The Lowland By Jhumpa Lahiri

Two brothers, a brilliant woman haunted by her unfortunate past, a love that exceeds the boundaries of death and a movement of the country which will decide the future of countless people, are what this book revolves around. The Lowland is a tale of Udayan and Subhash Mitra who are born just fifteen months apart, but possess starkly different personalities and they encounter futures that are poles apart. In the 1960s, Udayan Mitra is an impulsive person with a magnetizing personality and gets involved in the Naxalite movement, a movement aimed to eradicate inequality and poverty. On the other hand his brother chooses an entirely different life of scientific research in a quiet, peaceful coastal corner of America. Life brings Subhash back to India after he learns about the unfortunate incident that happens to his brother in the lowland near his family home. The incident brings him back to his roots and his torn his family together, including his brother's wife. He tries to heal the wounds which his brother left behind. A story based in both India and America, The Lowland is fiercely thoughtful and overflows with human emotion. The book gives you goose bumps as the complex intricacies of varied human emotions like love, affinity and dedication are unveiled.

About the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of three previous works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake and most recently, Unaccustomed Earth. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

“A subtle but devastating tale of two brothers coming of age in 1960s Calcutta . . . The themes of this beautifully written novel may be grand—love, revolution, desertion—but it’s an intimate tale that offers no easy answers.” —Parade

“Compelling . . . beautiful. A family saga that finds its roots in a 1967 Calcutta rebellion [but] extends its reach to present-day Rhode Island. The long-awaited follow-up to her ravishing first novel, The Namesake, justifies its lengthy gestation. The story develops like a rip in a piece of fabric that keeps tearing: a gripping meditation on absence, alienation and loss . . . Exquisitely written and deeply moving.” —Sophie Harris, Time Out New York

“It’s been a few weeks since I finished The Lowland, and my head and heart are still with the book. The novel moves back and forth in time and takes on different points of view, which allow readers to see how anger and betrayal redound through the generations . . . The Lowland dwells in complex territory [and its] insights point toward an unspoken question: Is it irresponsible—or even criminal—to risk your life for a political cause that may not be realized in your lifetime? The Lowland is a stylistic achievement and marks a shift in Lahiri’s writing. As always, the novel is full of sharp insights about marriage and parenthood, politics and commitment. It is the kind of book that stays with you long after you finish it.” —Julie Hakim Azzam, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Lahiri’s new novel begins in the manner of Flaubert . . . It is her big novel: possessed of historical moment and reach. But for the most part, history is only the element in which the characters’ lives unfold, and this allows Lahiri to exercise her own special talent. She is capable of great elegance, and here, her subject is the failure of relationships between characters, and the ways in which people hold back from living their lives . . . Lahiri writes with great emotional precision [and] moves confidently between different periods in a manner reminiscent of James Salter’s Light Years. Her version of the epic is one in which the ordinary becomes illuminated. She seems to write of families, but actually writes of aloneness, of people avoiding those who are closest to them . . . Her voice [has] unusual, almost old-fashioned moral authority.” —Anjali Joseph, The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Stunning. . . Lahiri is an American realist in the manner of John Updike, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen . . . Her magisterial canvases portray the elusive, vexed promises that comprise the mythos of the United States . . . In The Lowland, a multigenerational family story that unfolds in counterpoint between India and the United States, Lahiri emphasizes neither the immigrant’s cultural displacement nor a contest of values between old world and new. Rather, this exquisitely written novel defines the very condition of American life through an exploration of the impossible prospect of belonging . . . The Lowland [is written] with astonishing precision, moving far beyond the terrain of immigrant displacement to map patterns of unity and separation in the smallest moments of daily life [and] painstakingly delineating the defining trait of Americanness: an intricate, dynamic balance between flux and constancy, permanence and transience. The Lowland orchestrates this balance with a tragic lyricism, honoring the United States, and telling its myriad stories of insiders and outsiders alike.” —Urmila Seshagiri, Los Angeles Review of Books