- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Harpercollins Publishers India; (Reissue) edition (5 September 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 817223502X
- ISBN-13: 978-8172235024
- Product Dimensions: 14 x 1.5 x 21.5 cm
- Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise.
- A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland…
- Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose is beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail, evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here), and full of emotional pull and reverberation.