Showing all 7 books
The Village by the Sea is Anita Desai’s classic children’s fable about a brother and sister, Hari and Lila, who have to face the darkness and difficulties of the adult world. Exquisitely written, with sensitivity and delicacy, Desai’s book won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and remains one of her most beloved works.
An Award-winning story about a family's survival in a small fishing village in India. With their mother ill and their father permanently drunk, Hari and lila have to earn the money to keep house and look after their two young sisters. Indespration, Hari runs away to Bombay, and Lila is left to cope alone.
Nanda Kaul is old. Long ago, she queened it as Vice Chancellor's wife. Now she lives alone in her villa in the Simla hills, looking across to the snows of the distant Himalayas, down to the hot, dusty plain below. She treasures her solitude, free at last from the claims and demands of family, servants, position. But to interrupt her summer peace comes Raka, her great grand daughter, a strange, isolated child whose own wish for solitude is as intense as the old ...
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 ...
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 ...
Set against England's green and grisly landscape, enigmatic and attractive to some, depressing and nauseating to others, Bye-Bye Black Bird explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in an alien society.
Where Shall We Go This Summer is an intense story of a sensitive young wife torn between the desire to abandon the boredom and hypocrisy of her middle class and ostensibly comfortable existance, and the realisation that the bonds that tie her to it cannot easily be broken.