Adult Book of the Month
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is 1960s India and Udayan finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother’s political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.
But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother
in the lowland outside their family’s home, he goes back to India,
hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds
Udayan left behind—including those seared in the heart of his brother’s
wife. Moving from the 1960s to the present and from India to America,
The Lowlands is a moving portrait of three generations of a family
bound and fractured by the demands of love and loyalty.
‘Profound … real and convincing. The characters don’t
act like people in a novel: they are much closer to real life in their
responses, their heartfelt cries of pain’
Eileen Battersby Irish Times
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and currently lives in Rome. Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A later collection Unaccustomed Earth won the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
By the same author:
Interpreter of Maladies
The Namesake
Unaccustomed earth
