April 2011 Guest Editor Lesley Lokko on Jhumpa Lahiri...
She really is a writer who Can Do It All – from profound, involved and emotionally switched-on novels like The Namesake to short, snappy collections of life’s wonderful snippets in Unaccustomed Earth – she’s wonderful. Every time I read her I find myself putting the book down just to catch my breath...what a wordsmith! And she’s gorgeous. Not fair.
Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth explores the heart of family life and the immigrant experience. Eight luminous stories - longer and richer than any Jhumpa Lahiri has yet written - take us from America to Europe, India and Thailand as they follow new lives forged in the wake of loss.
'Lahiri's enormous gifts as a storyteller are on full display ... gorgeous' Khaled Hosseini
'Probably the most influential writer of fiction in America' Financial Times
'Contains some of the best, most beautiful fiction written this decade - the kind that will be read 50 years from now' New Statesman
'It's difficult to think of a contemporary writer who gives her characters so much dignity ... Fiction of matchless restraint, yet also of rich, complex lives and credible characters' The Times
Author
About Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but is currently teaching in New York. She has published her fiction in various US journals including the New Yorker, and has won several US prizes for her work.
