Book description
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days,…
Why read it?
1 author picked Whereabouts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.
Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with…
From Kate's list on short stories that make domestic life seem weird.
If you love Whereabouts...
The Golden Land
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships.
Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s…
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