The Artist of Disappearance

Description

A jewel of a book from India's finest living woman writer. A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas make up Anita Desai's exquisite new book. Set in modern India, but where history still casts a long shadow, the stories move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these stories remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.

Profoundly elegiac -- Margaret Drabble * New Statesman * From a web of connections, Desai spins stories of history and loss that move the reader not with epiphanies, but through the sheer beauty of her storytelling * Time Out * Elegantly paced and smartly crafted -- Fatima Bhutto * Financial Times * Anita Desai writes exquisitely -- Allan Massie * Scotsman * Bewitchingly beautiful * The Times *