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.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
"Glorious.... Showcases a considerable talent in full bloom." -San Francisco Chronicle
In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden-where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In "A Choice of Accommodations," a couple's romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In "Only Goodness," a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in "Hema and Kaushik," a trio of linked stories-a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate-we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.
Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author's signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.
