Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai

Hailed as “unsparing, yet tender and funny,” Fasting, Feasting is a “splendid novel” about siblings and their very different lives in India and America. (The Wall Street Journal)
Fasting, Feasting tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family.
Beautifully written and bleakly comedic, Fasting, Feasting explores family dynamics in opposing cultures. Desai has a gift for conveying “the tangled complexities of Indian tradition with an economy of language that is clean, simple and elegantly straightforward." (The Denver Post)