Book Review: In Custody by Anita Desai

Introduction

• ISIN: 9780140238136
• Genre: Fiction / Drama
• Publishers: Random House
• Price: Rs. 595/- (I got this book for review from the publisher)

Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India’s greatest Urdu poet, Nur – a project that can only end in disaster.

Behind The book

Source: Google Images

About the author

Anita Desai was born in 1937. Her published works include adult novels, children's books and short stories. SHe is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. Anita Mazumdar Desai is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, is the winner of the 2006 Booker prize.

Me thinks

I have always admired the writing style of the author Anita Desai. She has a knack of weaving emotions so beautiful amidst a startling array of characters that the effect is just spell binding.The author talks about bygone eras, times that were and yet recreates the magic so well that a reader is left asking for more.

She doesn’t cease to surprise me with her work every time I read one of her books and I would really like to thank Random House for giving me such an amazing opportunity to read her wonderful books.This book is I had to describe in one word it would be – enchantingly beautiful. Well I have a strange norm not to watch movies based on books and luckily I haven’t watched one that was made on this movie. That ensured I basked in the beauty of this book completely.

From the first word to the last this book is rich in emotions as it talks about life and the complexity of relationships so heart touchingly. The author has managed to pull the reader to the city where the main character Deven is based and go through all that he does, in a way exist is his body and experience what he does.

His fears, his anguish, the pain, the worry and the scepticism towards life, all makes it one gripping read. The author’s narrative is exemplarily making me fall in love with her one more time. There are a lot of places where I had to stop reading the book for sometime as the emotions had gripped me so hard somewhere in the gut that I felt too choked up to read it further.

Strongly recommended for people who enjoy Indian writers, Indian fiction and most importantly tales that are based on relationships and high on emotions.

Foodie Verdict

This book is like cheese cake - yummy , rare, different and delicious!

Source: Google Images

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