'Clear Light of Day', 'Fire on the Mountain' and 'Voices in the City' are novels by:

"Clear Light of Day", "Fire on the Mountain" and "Voices in the City" are novels by the Indian English writer Anita Desai.

About these novels:

"Voices in the City" (1965): about three siblings, Nirode, Monisha and Amla, struggling to find meaning in life in Calcutta.

"Fire on the Mountain" (1977): about an elderly woman, Nanda Kaul, living alone in Kasauli, whose solitude is disturbed by the arrival of her great-granddaughter. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award (1978).

"Clear Light of Day" (1980): set in Old Delhi, it tells the story of the Das family, especially the sisters Bim and Tara, against the background of Partition. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

About Anita Desai:

• She was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, to a Bengali father and a German mother.
• Her novels focus on the inner lives of characters, especially women, and on loneliness, family relationships and cultural conflict.
• She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: "Clear Light of Day" (1980), "In Custody" (1984) and "Fasting, Feasting" (1999).
• "In Custody", about an Urdu poet, was made into a film by Merchant Ivory Productions (1993).
• Her other works include "Cry, the Peacock" (1963), "Baumgartner's Bombay" (1988) and "The Village by the Sea" (1982), a children's novel that won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
• She received the Padma Bhushan (2014).
• Her daughter, Kiran Desai, won the Booker Prize in 2006 for "The Inheritance of Loss".

Other Indian women novelists in English:

• Nayantara Sahgal: "Rich Like Us" (Sahitya Akademi Award, 1986).
• Shashi Deshpande: "That Long Silence" (Sahitya Akademi Award, 1990).
• Arundhati Roy: "The God of Small Things".
• Kamala Markandaya: "Nectar in a Sieve".

Why not the other options?

• ✗Kiran Desai, Anita Desai's daughter, wrote "The Inheritance of Loss".
• ✗Nayantara Sahgal wrote "Rich Like Us".
• ✗Shashi Deshpande wrote "That Long Silence".