One of the most accomplished fiction writers of English today, Anita Desai has established herself through the consistency of her formidable body of work. From acclaimed children's fiction--The Village by the Sea: An Indian Family Story (1982) won the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction in 1983--to collections of poignant short stories, and from several scholarly introductions to a screenplay for an award-winning movie, Desai's writing has been consistently of the highest quality. Her lucid and penetrating novels for adults constitute the central pillar of her achievement and are becoming increasingly widely read. Desai's novels deal with the intimate psychological worlds of individuals whose identities, thoughts, and emotions are affected by their different and often clashing affiliations to, among others, familial, geographical, linguistic, professional, class, ethnic, and national groups. Desai herself has been affiliated with different groups--as an Indian woman writing in English she has been categorized as an...