A beautiful little book, and shows Anita Desai's extraordinary grasp on the literary sentence! The description of post-Independence Indian households in which the second-person narrator's mother lived so evocative and delicately written. In way of shortcoming: the reader does not trust this interest in the 'stranger' and here the length works against the novel. More could have been said about what the draw of this stranger figure was! I won't spoil it but the ending was a little bit of a non-ending also