Unaccustomed Earth

A masterfully crafted new work of fiction from the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author: eight stories that transport us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, touching the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. These stories are longer and more emotionally complex than any of the author's previous works.

In the gorgeous novel with the same title, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, receives a visit from her father, who takes great care of her garden, where he and his grandson develop a unique relationship. But he's keeping a love affair to himself and keeping it a secret from his daughter. In "A Choice of Accommodations," while the party rages late into the night, a husband's plan to make an old friend's wedding into a romantic vacation weekend with his wife takes a sinister, revealing turn. In "Only Goodness," a sister who is desperate to provide her younger brother with the ideal upbringing she was never able to experience is overcome with remorse, agony, and fury as her family is threatened by his alcoholism. And in the trilogy of interconnected tales "Hema and Kaushik," we follow the lives of a girl and boy who share a Massachusetts home one winter. It is a brilliant, very captivating elegy of life, death, love, and destiny. From innocence to experience, they embark on different, often traumatic roads until, years later, in Rome, fate pulls them back together.

Jhumpa Lahiri's characteristic qualities are abundant in Unaccustomed Earth: beautiful writing, emotional knowledge, and nuanced portrayals of the most complex mental and emotional processes. It is the brilliant, magnificent work of a writer at the height of her abilities.