Gathering together radiant new stories, "Diamond Dust" travels from India to the American Northeast, deftly exploring the tensions between social obligation and personal independence, between old traditions and new.

Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era is the story of the profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The book follows Hugo Baumgartner as he leaves behind Nazi Germany and his Jewish heritage for Calcutta, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war's end.

As Uma, the unmarriageable adult daughter of an Indian lawyer, copes with her parents' demands and traditional Indian family life, her younger brother, Arun, must face a vastly different life living with an American family in a Massachusetts suburb.

Sisterly love is the focus of this novel, set in Old Delhi against the backdrop of some of India's most significant historical events, including the death of Gandhi and the malaria epidemic.

From the author of Fasting, Feasting comes her visually and emotionally haunting new novel.
Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced -- by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a "ghost" mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth.
On the Dia de los...

Like so many other young Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of 'the Mother', but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother's own story - from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.

Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced - by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a 'ghost' mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. On the Dia de los Muertos, the feast day when the locals celebrate and remember their dead, the various strands of the...

Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
The excellent strength the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them. San Francisco Chronicle
Set in modern India, these three novellas 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. An unnamed government official is called...