About Book
A classic from one of India?s greatest writers with a stunning new cover in water colour /
Gone are the days when Nanda Kaul watched over her family and played the part of Vice-Chancellor?s wife. Leaving her children behind in the real world, the busier world, she has chosen to spend her last years alone in the mountains in Kasauli, in a secluded bungalow called Carignano.
Until one summer her great-granddaughter Raka is dispatched to Kasauli ? and everything changes. Nanda is at first dismayed at this break in her preciously acquired solitude. Fiercely taciturn, Raka is, like her, quite untamed. The girl prefers the company of apricot trees and animals to her great- grandmother?s, and spends her afternoons rambling over the mountainside. But the two are more alike than they know. Throughout the hot, long summer, Nanda?s old, hidden dependencies and wounds come to the surface, ending, inevitably, in tragedy.
Marvellous yet restrained, Fire on the Mountain speaks of the past and its unshakable hold over the present.
About Author
Anita Desai is one of India?s foremost writers. She has written numerous works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999)?all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize?as well as Baumgartner?s Bombay (1988) and The Zigzag Way (2004). In Custody was made into a film by Merchant-Ivory productions, starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri. Her most recent work is The Artist of Disappearance (2011).
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently Sahitya Akademi in India, Anita Desai has also been a Professor of Writing at MIT and has frequently been honoured with awards, among them the Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri.
Born in Mussoorie to a German mother and a Bengali father, she was educated in Delhi, and currently divides her time between USA and Mexico.