Book Review - Unaccustomed Earth

Rating - 5/5

Outstanding. Mature writing. Engrossing stories.

This is Jhumpa Lahiri's third book after The Interpreter of Maladies (Short stories) and The Namesake (Novel).

I read The Interpreter of Maladies a year back and was very impressed by Lahiri's writing. Although her stories are open ended, the prose is very good and you are hooked in the first few pages.

The basic premise is the same in all her stories - bengalis staying in America or returning from America to India. But this common setting is just incidental. The real core of each story is the observations on human relationships - father & daughter, monthers and daughters, brothers and sisters.

While this time the stories are longer, they have more depth and the prose has improved by leaps and bounds.

If I were to rank her books, I would put Unaccustomed Earth on the top followed by The Namesake and last but not the least The Interpreter of Maladies.