Boman Desai

Boman Desai was bound for a career in market analysis when a chance encounter with Sir Edmund Hillary turned him back to writing. He had his first break when an elegant elderly woman submitted his stories to Debonair—all of which were published, but the woman vanished, never to make herself known. He had his second break when another elegant elderly woman, Diana Athill, published his first novel, The Memory of Elephants. Desai has also published TRIO, a Novel Biography of the Schumanns and Brahms (awarded the Kirkus star, listed among their Best Books of 2016); A Googly in the Compound (a novel of the Raj), ranging from 1910 to 1945, from rural Navsari to cosmopolitan Bombay to 1930s London to wartorn Burma and Mesopotamia, both world wars playing a role in the plot; Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love, in which a vivacious, intelligent, beautiful, talented, rich, spoiled, and selfish woman, pays the price for her indulgences, spanning the years from WWII to the 1980s; and The Elephant Graveyard (winner of the Dana Award), doing for elephants what Moby Dick does for whales, in which thrills and zaniness mingle with meditations on slavery, circusing, the afterlife, and the ivory trade.