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Synopsis The present volume on the fiction of Canadian writer Margaret Laurence and Indian English writer Anita Desai is conceived as a project in comparative framework. It interrogates and critiques significant questions relating to identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism, immigration, globalization, alienation and affirmation that confront the Canadian and Indian society and the literary world. If the Canadian ethos is marked by the 'multicultural mosaic', the Indian situation is characterized by the paradigm of a 'rainbow'. This study takes the position that although the two societies – Canadian and Indian - are apparently too diverse to lend themselves to direct comparison, yet the commonality of perspectives and situations cannot be dismissed in a cursory manner. Both the writers under study have taken due note of this 'ambivalence' in their fictional writings, that forms the core of the present book on the discourse of alienation in the novels of Margaret Laurence and Anita Desai. In fine, the book makes a rich contribution to the corpus of Commonwealth literature, Comparative literature and Multicultural studies.