Fire On The Mountain

Description

Nanda Kaul is old. She has chosen to spend her last years high up in the mountains where she can arrange her thoughts into tranquility. But her solitude is broken when her fragile and secretive great-grand-daughter, Raka, comes to stay. It is an intrusion Nanda Kaul deeply resents, but this child has a capacity to change things. Through the long hot summer months hidden dependencies and old wounds are uncovered, until tragedy seems as inevitable as a forest fire on the hillsides surrounding the villa.

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include novels, children's books and short stories. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting Feasting (1999) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and of Girton College at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Writing Program at M.I.T and divides her time between India, Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. In Custody was recently filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions.

Anita Desai's lyrical yet pointed prose powerfully draws the portrait of a woman who can never blossom into her own in such an arid social landscape. * World Literature Today *