Spring Intensive 2020

Somini Sengupta emigrated from Calcutta to California as a young child in 1975. Returning thirty years later as the bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration and possibility--at least by the illusion of possibility--as it is by the structures of sex and caste.

With imaginative lushness and narrative elan, Mehta provides a novel that combines Indian storytelling with thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love--love both carnal and sublime, treacherous and redeeming.

Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, Siddhartha is the story of a soul's long quest for the answer to the enigma of man's role on earth.