The Lowland - Hardcover

Lahiri, Jhumpa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067697936X ISBN 13: 9780676979367

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2013

Synopsis

WINNER 2015 – DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

Two brothers bound by tragedy; a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past; a country torn by revolution: the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author gives us a powerful new novel--set in both India and America--that explores the price of idealism, and a love that can last long past death.

Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and
Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--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 comes 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.

Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2013: But for its lyrical, evocative scenes of life in the Calcutta neighborhood in which her heroes grow up, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland could be set anywhere, in almost any time. At the center of this heartbreaking story are two very different brothers. Udayan, the younger by 15 months, is passionate, idealistic and ripe for involvement in the political rebellion in 1960s India (not all that different from his American counterparts of the same era.) Subhash is the “good brother,” the parent-pleaser, who goes off to study and teach in America. But when Udayan, inevitably, ends up a victim of his self-made political violence, Subhash steps in and marries his dead brother’s pregnant wife. His is the proverbial good deed that will never go unpunished; Subhash soon becomes a victim of his own goodness. As always, Lahiri’s prose is lyrical and rich and her story is steeped in history, but in this book (more perhaps than The Namesake, her other novel) the issues raised are more universal and the plot more linear. Competitive siblings, parental love, commitment to belief and family, these are the topics one of our most brilliant writers addresses in what is at once her most accessible, and most profound, book yet. --Sara Nelson

About the Author

JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award; The Namesake; and Unaccustomed Earth, a #1 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and 2 children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 067697936X
• ISBN 13: 9780676979367
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352