A major international best-seller, "The Namesake" is the debut novel from Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of "Interpreter of Maladies" that bagged the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and won critical acclaim for its "grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America."

The Book

The Namesake is a cross-cultural, multigenerational story of a Hindu Bengali family’s journey to self-acceptance in Boston. Jhumpa masterfully explores the themes of the complexities of the immigrant experience and foreignness, the clash of lifestyles, cultural disorientation, the conflicts of assimilation, the tangled ties between generations... and paints a portrait of an Indian family torn between the pull of respecting family traditions, and the American way of life. It is a tale of love, solitude and emotional upheavals with an amazing eye for detail and ironic observation.