Nectar in a Sieve

The acclaimed million-copy bestselling novel about a woman’s struggle to find happiness in a changing India.

Married as a child bride to a tenant farmer she had never met, Rukmani works side by side in the field with her husband to wrest a living from a land ravaged by droughts, monsoons, and insects. With remarkable fortitude and courage, she meets changing times and fights poverty and disaster.
 
This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life is a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loves—an unforgettable novel that “will wring your heart out” (Associated Press).

Includes an Introduction by Indira Ganesan
And an Afterword by Thrity Umrigar“Comparable in many ways to Cry, The Beloved Country...if anything...better.”—Saturday Evening Post

“Nectar in a Sieve has a wonderful, quiet authority...without reticence or excess.”—Donald Barr, The New York Times
 
“A novel to retain in your heart.”—Milwaukee Journal

“Very moving.”—Harper’s Magazine

“An elemental book. It has something better than power, the truth of distilled experience.”—New York Herald Tribune
 
“Unique in poetic beauty, in classically restrained and controlled tragedy.”—Dorothy Canfield Fisher, noted author and critic
 
“A superb job in telling her story.”—The Christian Science Monitor
Kamala Markandaya was a pseudonym used by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. Born in Bangalore, India in 1924, Markandaya was educated at the University of Madras in Chennai, India, and worked briefly for a weekly newspaper before emigrating to England in 1948. There she met her husband, with whom she lived in London. Nectar in a Sieve, her first novel, was published in 1954. She died in England in 2004.