Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is one of today's most acclaimed writers, having won a Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her placid, poetic writing is back in another collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth. Though the rhythm of the stories grows repetitive, by the end of the collection the reader will find herself enthralled, and at the mercy of Lahiri's emotional passages.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden -- where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories -- a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate -- we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.