This is Anita Desai’s first novel for children, and it received the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award in 1982. She here creates a vivid picture of a family, of life in a small Indian village and of all the teeming hustle and bustle of Bombay. Lila is thirteen and her brother Hari only twelve, yet as the eldest children of a poor Indian family fallen on hard times they feel responsible for looking after their young sisters. Their mother is seriously ill, needing constant nursing, and heir father, who is out of work, spends most of his time in a drunken stupor. Seeing no way out of their poverty, Lila and Hari are forced to accept it and desperately they try and keep the family together. Then one day Hari goes to Bombay, and suddenly things begin to change. How the gentle Lila copes while Hari is away and how Hari, a simple village boy, finds himself a job in the city and eventually comes home with positive plans for the future makes for a marvelous piece of storytelling.
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