Kamala Markandaya

"This realistic novel of peasant life in a southern Indian village portrays the struggle that Nathan and Rukmani must make to survive. Their first child is a daughter, Irawaddy, and there follow five other children, all sons, after an interval of seven years. Hardships are innumerable and insurmountable, whether they are disasters of nature such as drought, or such man-made catastrophes as the coming of a tannery to their village and a subsequent labor conflict. After many crises, Nathan and Rukmani come to the city to seek help from one of their sons, but he has disappeared. Nathan, finally destroyed by privation, dies, believing to the end that his life with Rukmani has been a happy one." Shapiro. Fic for Youth. 2d edition.

In a world where Thinkers control the population and Rules are not meant to be broken, fifteen-year-old Violet Schoenfeld must make a choice to control or be controlled after learning truths about her "dead" sister and "missing" father.

Stories and excerpts of novels from India since the country attained its independence in 1947. The subjects range from religious strife, to the assault on the senses of the many people one is surrounded by.

Mira, young daughter of an upper-class Hindu family, shows herself to us in relation to her Hindu family, to her Oxford-educated older brother, Kit, and Kit's shy new wife, Prem, and to the woman intellectual, Roshan, with whom she works on a nationalist periodical. She falls in love with Richard Marlowe, an official of the British government in India, which causes conflict in her family and at a time when the conflict between British rfule and the Indian will to freedom is growing.