Baumgartner's Bombay

Description

'A daring and colourful novel. A superb observer of the human race' New York Times Book Review Hugo Baumgartner is a man who doesn't belong anywhere. He's a Berlin Jew who travelled to India to escape the Nazis and, after years spent the mercy of his past and his tumultuous adopted land, he has now retired to a seedy cat-filled apartment behind Bombay's Taj Hotel. But destiny has not finished with Baumgartner, in this haunting tale of the afflictions of exile.

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.

A daring, colorful novel... Desai is a superb observer of the human race * New York Times * One of the best English novelists writing in English * Independent * Hugo Baumgartner, the central character of Anita Desai's dazzling novel, is a wandering Jew all his life. From the agonising scenes of his childhood in pre-war Berlin, through his spell in business in Calcutta and then Bombay, he simply does not belong. Too dark for Hitler's society, he is too fair for India; he remains a firanghi, a foreigner, whatever he goes * Daily Telegraph * Beautifully observed... Recovers a lost slice of history in its portrayal of a wounded survivor * Observer * Cleverly constructed, and full of sharp perceptions about human nature under the skin, whatever the colour * The Times *