Anita Desai Anita

Anita Desai is the Indian novelist — the same author of Baumgartner's Bombay and Clear Light of the Day — whose work returned repeatedly to voyage and self-discovery. Journey to Ithaca is her novel in which a young man searches for a spiritual master in India while his partner tracks an elusive goddess figure across the subcontinent, bringing travel writing into the shuttle of the novel.

In this late work Desai turned her characteristic irony on the full tide of Western spiritual seeking. Alongside her Indian fiction, the journey-quest shape allowed her to probe alienation, belief and the search for meaning with humour and sorrow.