Baumgartner's Bombay

Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era is a story of the profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY follows Hugo Baumgartner as he leaves behind Nazi Germany -- and his Jewish heritage -- for Calcutta, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien, and then released to Bombay at war's end. Desai's "capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion" (NEW REPUBLIC) is in full evidence in this tale of a man who, "like a figure in a Greek tragedy . . . seems to elude his destiny" (NEW LEADER).