Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne, written for the Times of India in Bombay and been a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2008, and lives in London and Bombay. Saraswati Park is her first novel.
'Joseph writes beautifully about quietness and stillness!she evokes the physical world that her characters inhabit exactly, without ever resorting to the sort of touristic colour that mars some English language Indian novels!this is a quiet, restrained novel but a great deal is going on beneath the surface' Sunday Times 'Joseph contrasts the inner and outer lives of her characters, and the uneasy friction between new and old cultures, with all the wit and delicacy of a latter-day Mrs Gaskell' The Times 'Anjali Joseph's debut novel is replete with evocative images of Bombay!but the book's greatest strength lies in its delicate portrayal of a young man's desperation for intimate connection, and a couple's acceptance of a marriage that has failed' Financial Times 'An unhurried, quietly heartbreaking study of a lower middle-class Bombay family's disintegration and renewal!Joseph's skill is finding the poetry inside modest dreams, small tragedies and disappointments' Metro 'A beautiful novel that personifies the new India from the inside out' Literary Review 'The frustrations of middle-class family life are the focus of Bombay-set Saraswati Park ! each character quickly feels like a familiar face, making this like The Corrections, but set in India!a treat' ELLE 'Since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children the dominant mode of Indian fiction in English has been a kind of manic inclusiveness!Anjali Jospeh's first novel is remarkable for how clearly it rejects that ambition: modest in scale, refined in sensibility, and almost free of dramatic incident, it recalls the hushed, civilised tones of a generation of novelists that included R K Marayan!the limpidity of Joseph's writing allows her to enter with unusual force into these torpid, melancholic lives. But the tone of her narrative is leavened by the gentle humour of her characterisation' TLS 'Here is the suburban, petit bourgeois world of Bombay, seldom written about before, and with such acuity, delicacy, and intelligence, illuminated at different times of day by flashes of reflected light. This is the best debut novel I've read for a long time: admirable in its masterful ease, moving in its constant surrender to compassion and wonder' Amit Chaudhuri 'A wry and delicate portrait of domestic life, brimful of secret longings' Giles Foden "A first novel of great poise, full of understated drama" Tash Aw
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