The core characters comprise a family living in a small town in India, where provincial customs and attitudes dictate the future of all children: girls are to be married off and boys are to become as educated as possible.

Uma spends her life in subservience to her older demanding parents, while massive effort and energy are expended to ensure Arun's education and placement in a university in Massachusetts.

Rather a series of events from life than a complexly plotted work, we follow the fortunes of Uma and Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day-to-day living.

Another character is the religious Mira Masi who tells Uma all the tales of Krishna and takes her to the ashram allowing her to escape her mother's domination for a time.

[2] [3] [4] [5] In an initial review for India Today, Jyoti Arora wrote "A certain starkness of vision, an uncompromising realism and superbly evocative images are immediately striking in the novel.

In beautifully detailed prose Desai draws the foods and textures of an Indian small town and of an American suburb.

In both, she suggests, family life is a complex mixture of generosity and meanness, license and restriction: The novel's subtle revelation is in the unlikely similarities.

"[7] The day after J. M. Coetzee's novel, Disgrace, was announced as the winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, in an article for The Guardian, John Sutherland, Professor of English at University College, London, leaked hints of divisions and encampments on the panel — so incurring the wrath of the other judges, who wrote furious articles of their own, lambasting him for his indiscretion.

The jury was divided and the two female judges, writers Shena Mackay and Natasha Walter, were convinced the Fasting, Feasting should take the prize.

Outnumbered on the panel, their opinion was nevertheless strong enough to demand expression, and the Booker Prize judges took the unprecedented step of naming Fasting, Feasting as runner-up.