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  • Published: 15 March 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099428473
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $37.99

Journey to Ithaca




'One of the best Indian novelists writing in English' - Independent

Like so many other young Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of 'the Mother', but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother's own story - from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.

  • Published: 15 March 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099428473
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $37.99

About the author

Anita Desai

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Royal Society of Literature.

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Praise for Journey to Ithaca

A beautiful book of epic scope... Anita Desai has surpassed her own previous high standards

Literary Review

Full of revelations and pleasures

Independent on Sunday

She writes an extraordinarily delicate, lucid English... She is a writer's writer in that anyone who has ever set pen to paper must ask himself just what it is about the writing that makes it so memorable

Victoria Glendinning, Times Literary Supplement

Superbly powerful... A rich, evocative book

Spectator