This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down’s syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives,
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An evocative and richly imagined story of a British Muslim woman’s search for love and belonging in two very different worlds.
When Lilly is eight years old, her pot-smoking hippy British parents leave her at a Sufi shrine in Morocco and inform her they will be back to collect her in three days. Three weeks later, she learns they’ve been murdered. Lilly fills that haunted hollow in her life with the intense study and memorization of the Qur’an under the patient care of the Sufi saint’s disciple she was entrusted to. Years later, her journey from Morocco to Harar,
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One late wine- and gossip-fueled night, four friends on a lark create a fateful test of friendship — one that challenges the very principles and boundaries of their alliance. To pass it means to never, at any cost, betray one another. Twenty years later, they must face that ultimate test.
We meet them at the dawn of their camaraderie in the 1980s and already each woman is distinguished from the other: Tamsin, the compassionate mother hen; Reagan, the brazen and clever overachiever; Sarah, the seemingly perfect beauty; and Freddie, who despite being far from her U.S. home, finds strength in her friends.
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Natalie and Tom have been best friends forever. But Tom wants more, and he’s going to prove to Natalie that they’re meant to be together. He makes a wildly romantic proposition: spend 26 weekends together, indulging in a different activity from A-Z. In six months, he argues, they will be desperately in love. The cautious Natalie – recently burned by a longtime boyfriend – isn’t so sure.
But Tom and Natalie aren’t the only ones coping with the vagaries of love. Natalie’s mother is going through her own personal crisis and Lucy, Tom’s unhappily married sister-in-law, yearns to give in to temptation.
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In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. In a generous vision that is at times funny and at others sad, Desai’s characters face numerous choices which majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
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Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at Fayer Academy fifteen years ago. She has since become one of the best teachers the school has ever had. But Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. When she accepts an impulsive marriage proposal, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. The English Teacher is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her acclaimed,
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