Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies is a Pulitzer-winning collection of 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 discovers that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily, sending her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland.

Jhumpa Lahiri's prose is beautifully measured, subtle, and sober. She is a writer who leaves much 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.