Clear Light Of Day

Anita Desai’s accomplished family drama explores how the unexplored crises of childhood can reveal new worlds - if courage can be found to face them. A “rich, Chekhovian novel” about family and forgiveness from the acclaimed author of Fire on the Mountain (The New Yorker).

To Tara, revisiting her childhood home in old Delhi, the dusty, shabby house and neglected garden seem only too familiar, her sister and brother quite unchanged. Yet the impression is superficial, for here is no dead end, and within the old and the known, there are new discoveries to be made. Tara’s visit stirs many memories of a shared past. At the heart of this “wonderful” novel are the "moving relationships between the estranged members of the Das family" (The Washington Post Book World). 

"Though set in Old Delhi and centring in part on the Hindu/Moslem tensions of 1947 India, Desai's second novel is really a thoroughly universal tale of unhealable family hurts."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.  She is the Emerita John E Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Royal Society of Literature.