The stories unfold at locations ranging from Seattle to Massachusetts to India to Thailand. In A Choice of Accommodations, a husband tries to turn a friend's wedding into a romantic weekend getaway with his wife. But an unexpected turn of events startles the readers. In Only Goodness, a sister eager to give her younger brother the freedom she missed in her teen years encourages him to drink and is horrified a few years later when his alcoholism becomes worse and threatens her own family. Hema and Kaushik, the linked stories, offer a pulsating elegy of life, death, love and fate.
The new book received praise from influential trade publications such as Publishers Weekly and from fellow writers much before its formal release on April 4.
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'Lahiri's enormous gifts as a storyteller are on full display in this collection: The gorgeous, effortless prose; the characters haunted by regret, isolation, loss and tragedies big and small; and most of all, a quiet, emerging sense of humanity,' says Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner.
Giving the book a starred review and calling the collection 'stunning,' Publishers Weekly wrote: '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.'
It added: '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.'
Also giving it a starred review, Booklist called Lahiri 'an inspired miniaturist' who 'creates a lexicon of loaded images.'
It added: 'A hole burned in a dressy skirt suggests vulnerability and the need to accept imperfection. Van Eyck's famous painting, The Arnolfini Marriage, is a template for a tale contrasting marital expectations with the reality of familial relationships. A collapsed balloon is emblematic of failure. A lost bangle is shorthand for disaster. Lahiri's emotionally and culturally astute short stories (ideal for people with limited time for pleasure reading and a hunger for serious literature) are surprising, aesthetically marvelous and shaped by a sure and provocative sense of inevitability.'
Image: Jhumpa Lahiri at the 92nd Street Y, New York, in April 2004.
Photograph: Paresh Gandhi
Also read: Jhumpa Lahiri's wedding
