Unaccustomed Earth

Sarita Choudhury and Ajay Naidu take turns reading this collection of eight stories, in which Indian immigrants and their Americanized offspring struggle with questions of family, identity, love, and loss. Choudhury's pleasantly husky voice offers shrewd insights into Lahiri's work. She beautifully replicates the voices of Indian parents and captures the nuances of conversations between characters. Naidu excels at dramatizing the frequent dialogue in these stories, especially among Indian characters. In a few places Naidu's narration strikes the ear strangely (the odd emphasis here, the too forcefully bitter or sarcastic moment there), though this impression fades as the stories build in intensity and meaning. Both narrators allow the stories' resonance on the theme of loss to emerge in a quiet yet achingly poignant way. J.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 28, 2008
The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children—and that separates the children from India—remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies
and The Namesake
. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals.