A New York Times Notable Book: Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment with his wife and two children. Moonlighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished teenager, who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a privileged background, does not: desire, mystery, and a simpler life. Just as this Nepalese city struggles with the conflicts of change, Ramchandra must also learn to accommodate both tradition and his very modern desires, in this novel by the Whiting Award–winning author of Buddha's Orphans.
"There is an international fraternity of artists of the middle-class. What animates these artists' moral vision is above all compassion. The universality of this class and those themes is demonstrated in Samrat Upadhyay's first novel, The Guru of Love."
The New York Times Book Review
"Reads like a graceful, page-turning mixture of stirring romance and social commentary."
Entertainment Weekly
"The Guru of Love effectively weaves together the complicated dichotomies of man and mistress, love and lust, tradition and modernity."
