Happy books

From the acclaimed author of Arresting God in Kathmandu comes this engrossing story of love and loss in contemporary Nepal. The Guru of Love is a moving and important story- important for what it illuminates about the human need to love as well as lust, and for the light it shines on the political situation in Nepal and elsewhere.
Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment in Kathmandu with his wife and two children. Moon-lighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished young women who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a priviledge background, does not: desire, mystery, and the beauty of a simpler life.

From the first Nepali Author writing in English to be published in the west, Arresting God in Kathmandu brilliantly explores the nature of desire and spirituality in a changing society. With the assurance and unsentimental wisdom of a long-established writer, Upadhyay records the echoes of modernization throughout love and family. Here are husbands and wives bound together by arranged marriages but sometimes driven elsewhere by an intense desire for connection and transcendence. In a city where gods are omnipresent, where privacy is elusive and family defines identity, these men and women find themselves at the mercy of their desires but at the will of their society. Psychologically rich and astonishingly acute, Arresting God in Kathmandu introduces a potent new voice in contemporary fiction.