Book review

Not many readers of Shashi Deshpande may be aware that her first experiments in writing fiction started with the short story. Over the years, she has published about a hundred stories in literary journals, magazines and newspapers, in between writing her immensely popular novels which are now read all over the world, and taught in universities wherever Indian writing has an audience. In this collection we find Shashi Deshpande at her best, writing with subtlety and a rare sensitivity about men and women trapped in relationships and situations often not of their making. The wife of a successful politician who must look to a long-lost past in order to keep up the pretence of contentment; a little girl who cannot comprehend why the very fact of her being born is a curse; a young man whose fantasy of love drives him to murder; a newly-wed couple with dramatically differing views on what it means to get to know each other�every one of the characters here is delineated with lucidity and compassion. Written over the past three decades, the stories in this volume provide an insight into often forgotten aspects of human feelings and relationships, weaving a magical web of emotions that is testimony to the unusual depth and range of Shashi Deshpande�s writing.

�Shashi Deshpande�takes us into realms of the female psyche which no writer of the previous generation had dared put into words as candidly�
�Dieter Riemenschneider in The Story Must Be Told

�Deshpande�s finely honed sensibility infuses the delicate interplay of human relationships with a realistic ambience which serves to crystallize our thoughts, and all at once we see in her a natural extension of our own cognitive parameters�
�The Times of India


About the author Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, India, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. At the age of fifteen she went to Mumbai, where she graduated in Economics; she then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in Law. The early years of her marriage were largely given over to the care of her two young sons but she took a course in journalism and for a time worked on a magazine. Her writing career only began in earnest in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is also the author of four children�s books and four other novels�That Long Silence, If I Die Today, Come Up and Be Dead and Roots and Shadows, which won a prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her Pathologist husband, and has recently completed her MA in English literature.