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.

Anita Desai, A Recipient Of Many Literary Awards In India And Abroad, And A Creative Writing Teacher At Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Since 1993, In Addition To Being A Fellow Of The Royal Society Of Literature In London And Honorary Fellow Of The University Of Cambridge, Has Proved Herself To Be A Major Indian Novelist Of The Post-Seventies India, Whose Novels Epitomize The Emerging Women S Search For Self-Hood In The Indian Context.Fire On The Mountain (1977), Winner Of The 1978 National Academy Of Letters Award, And Generally Considered Desai S Masterpiece, Is A Beautiful Novel, Focused On Two Elderly Ladies And One Small Girl. Nanda Kaul Retires To A Hill Station House In Her Old Age, And Leads An Isolated Life There, When Her Great-Granddaughter Comes To Stay. With The Arrival Of Raka The Story Takes A New Turn, Gathers Momentum, And Unfurls Quickly To A Symbolic End When The Mountain Has Been Set On Fire.The Atlantic Critical Study Of Fire On The Mountain, Which Is Primarily Meant For The Students Of English Literature Of Indian Universities, Is A Comprehensive, Self-Sufficient And In-Depth Study Of The Text. The Author, A Distinguished Scholar In The Area, Has Taken Special Care To Combine Lucidity And Profundity In Her Treatment Of The Text. In Its Eight Chapters The Present Study Examines The Text From Various Angles Such As The Title, Themes, Characters, Images And Symbols, Narrative Technique, And Feminist Discourse, In Addition To Providing An Introduction , A Brief Story-Outline , And A Detailed Critical Summary Of The Entire Text In Its Three Parts, Along With A Select Bibliography And Sample Questions. The Book Will Be Immensely Useful For Students, Scholars And Teachers In The Area.

It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army. Long unavailable in the U.S., published in France as Nova Africa, Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.

While fishing in an Irish salmon stream one rainy morning, Father Declan de Loughry ponders the recent deathbed confession of his parishioner Kevin Dennehy. It seems Dennehy and his wife, Enda, had been quietly living a lie for fifty years. Yet the gravity of their deception doesn’t become clear to the good father until Enda shares the full tale of her suffering, finally confiding “the all of it.” Jeannette Haien’s exquisite, awardwinning first novel is a deceptively simple story that resonates with the power of a modern-day myth—an unforgettable narrative of transgression, empathy, and, ultimately, absolution.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.

Based on the life of the middle class intellectuals of Calcutta, it is an unforgettable story of a Bohemian brother and his two sisters caught in the cross-currents of changing social values. In many ways the story reflects a vivid picture of India's social transition - a phase in which the older elements are not altogether dead, and the emergent ones not fully evolved.