Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection gathers nine stories that move between Boston-area suburbs and Calcutta. In the opening story a young couple, estranged after a stillbirth, use nightly power cuts to confess things they have kept from each other. In the title piece, a tour guide who translates patients' symptoms for a doctor is unsettled when an American-born tourist confides a secret to him.
Other stories follow a Bengali girl in 1971 who watches a family friend from Dhaka follow news of the Bangladesh war, a Calcutta stairwell sweeper whose stories nobody believes, a lonely academic's wife who cannot learn to drive, and a young man settling into a Cambridge rooming house run by a century-old landlady.
The writing is restrained and exact, and the drama lies in what characters notice and fail to say. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an unusual honour for a first collection, along with the PEN/Hemingway Award, and it is widely taught as a model of the modern short story.
Book details
| Author | Jhumpa Lahiri |
|---|---|
| First published | 1999 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 198 |
| Setting | Boston area, New Jersey, Calcutta and Orissa, 1970s to 1990s |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2000, PEN/Hemingway Award 1999 |
Themes
- Marriage and estrangement
- Displacement
- Communication
- Loneliness
- Cultural translation
Who should read it
Readers who appreciate subtle, perfectly made short fiction about emotional distance and belonging.