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The Lowland

National Book Award Finalist; Man Booker Prize Finalist

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Author Jhumpa Lahiri
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Best Seller
Paperback
$18.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.18"W x 8.01"H x 0.93"D  
On sale Jun 17, 2014 | 432 Pages | 9780307278265
Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Finalist for the National Book Award
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book; A Time Top Fiction Book; An NPR "Great Read"; A Chicago Tribune Best Book; A USA Today Best Book; A People magazine Top 10 Book; A Barnes and Noble Best New Book; A Good Reads Best Book; A Kirkus Best Fiction Book; A Slate Favorite Book; A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book; An Apple Top 10 Book

The Lowland is an engrossing family saga steeped in history: the story of two very different brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn apart by revolution, and a love that endures long past death. Moving from the 1960s to the present, and from India to America and across generations, this dazzling novel is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.

“Poised, haunting, exquisitely effective storytelling. . . . Lahiri is one of our most beautiful chroniclers of the aching disjunctions of emigration and family.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Exquisite. . . . Lahiri explores here what she has always explored best: the fragile inner workings of her characters. . . . An American master.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Lahiri’s] finest work so far. . . . At once unsettling and generous. . . . Shattering and satisfying in equal measure.” —The New York Review of Books

“Poignant. . . . There is an important truth here—that life often denies us understanding, and sometimes all there is to hold on to is our ability to endure.” —NPR

“Intriguing. . . . Brim[s] with pain and love and all of life’s profound beauty.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Mesmerizing.” —The Washington Post Book World

“In The Lowland, we are all emigrants, not from one country to another but from the present to the future. . . . Tremendous.” —Lev Grossman, Time 

“A masterful work that shines with brilliant language. . . . [Lahiri] has created a masterpiece.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lahiri is an elegant stylist, effortlessly placing the perfect words in the perfect order time and again so we’re transported seamlessly into another place.” —Vanity Fair

“Divided consciousness has been Lahiri’s recurrent theme. . . . This time, Lahiri daringly redraws the map. . . . [Her] prose is blunter, less mellifluous: here worlds, new and old, contain terrors.”
—The Atlantic

“The lowland [of the title] serves as Lahiri’s telling metaphor for the dark, dank, weedy places that haunt our lives. . . . In its quiet intensity, [The Lowland] reminds us of the triumphant fiction of Alice Munro and William Trevor.” —Newsday

“A classic story of family and ideology at odds, love and risk closely twined. . . . An author, at the height of her artistry, spins the globe and comes full circle.” —Vogue

“A great American writer.” —Chicago Tribune

“Memorable, potent. . . . Lahiri has reached literary high ground with The Lowland.” —USA Today

“A master of dramatic turns, but not in the conventional sense. She lets tension build slowly until something snaps. What she twists is you. . . . Lahiri shows that a twist can be even more devastating when you’ve been afraid that it might happen all along. A” —Entertainment Weekly

“A must-read. . . . Delivers Lahiri’s trademark lyrical prose woven with a fast-paced narrative and indelible characters.” —Slate

“Lahiri returns confidently to the themes that have earned her critical praise, an eager audience and a Pulitzer Prize. . . . [Here] she adds a historical dimension that creates a vital, intriguing backdrop. . . . [The] story is unique, but it’s also universal, a reminder of the past’s pull on us all.” —The Miami Herald

“Expansive and intimate. . . . Lahiri’s writing is precise and restrained. . . . Loyalty and betrayal, lies and forgiveness, filial responsibility and abandonment, the choices and sacrifices we make to find our way in the world are beautifully wrought in this novel.” —The Oregonian

“Subtle but devastating. . . . 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

“The kind of book that stays with you long after you finish it. . . . Full of sharp insights about marriage and parenthood, politics and commitment.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Delicately harrowing. . . . Lahiri has a devastatingly keen ear for the tensions and
misunderstandings endemic in our closest relationships.” —Bloomberg News
© Laura Sciacovelli
JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. 

jhumpalahiri.net View titles by Jhumpa Lahiri
Normally she stayed on the balcony, reading, or kept to an adjacent room as her brother and Udayan studied and smoked and drank cups of tea. Manash had befriended him at Calcutta University, where they were both graduate students in the physics department. Much of the time their books on the behaviors of liquids and gases would sit ignored as they talked about the repercussions of Naxalbari, and commented on the day’s events.

The discussions strayed to the insurgencies in Indochina and in Latin American countries. In the case of Cuba it wasn’t even a mass movement, Udayan pointed out. Just a small group, attacking the right targets.

All over the world students were gaining momentum, standing up to exploitative systems. It was another example of Newton’s second law of motion, he joked. Force equals mass times acceleration.

Manash was skeptical. What could they, urban students, claim to know about peasant life?

Nothing, Udayan said. We need to learn from them.

Through an open doorway she saw him. Tall but slight of build, twenty-three but looking a bit older. His clothing hung on him loosely. He wore kurtas but also European-style shirts, irreverently, the top portion unbuttoned, the bottom untucked, the sleeves rolled back past the elbow.

He sat in the room where they listened to the radio. On the bed that served as a sofa where, at night, Gauri slept. His arms were lean, his fingers too long for the small porcelain cups of tea her family served him, which he drained in just a few gulps. His hair was wavy, the brows thick, the eyes languid and dark.

His hands seemed an extension of his voice, always in motion, embellishing the things he said. Even as he argued he smiled easily. His upper teeth overlapped slightly, as if there were one too many of them. From the beginning, the attraction was there.

He never said anything to Gauri if she happened to brush by. Never glancing, never acknowledging that she was Manash’s younger sister, until the day the houseboy was out on an errand, and Manash asked Gauri if she minded making them some tea.

She could not find a tray to put the teacups on. She carried them in, nudging open the door to the room with her shoulder.
Looking up at her an instant longer than he needed to, Udayan took his cup from her hands.

The groove between his mouth and nose was deep. Clean-shaven. Still looking at her, he posed his first question.

Where do you study? he asked.

*
Because she went to Presidency, and Calcutta University was just next door, she searched for him on the quadrangle, and among the bookstalls, at the tables of the Coffee House if she went there with a group of friends. Something told her he did not go to his classes as regularly as she did. She began to watch for him from the generous balcony that wrapped around the two sides of her grandparents’ flat, overlooking the intersection where Cornwallis Street began. It became something for her to do.

Then one day she spotted him, amazed that she knew which of the hundreds of dark heads was his. He was standing on the opposite corner, buying a packet of cigarettes. Then he was crossing the street, a cotton book bag over his shoulder, glancing both ways, walking toward their flat.

She crouched below the filigree, under the clothes drying on the line, worried that he would look up and see her. Two minutes later she heard footsteps climbing the stairwell, and then the rattle of the iron knocker on the door of the flat. She heard the door being opened, the houseboy letting him in.

It was an afternoon everyone, including Manash, happened to be out, and she’d been reading, alone. She wondered if he’d turn back, given that Manash wasn’t there. Instead, a moment later, he stepped out onto the balcony.

No one else here? he asked.

She shook her head.

Will you talk to me, then?

The laundry was damp, some of her petticoats and blouses were clipped to the line. The material of the blouses was tailored to the shape of her upper torso, her breasts. He unclipped one of the blouses and put it further down the line to make room.

He did this slowly, a mild tremor in his fingers forcing him to focus more than another person might on the task. Standing beside him, she was aware of his height, the slight stoop in his shoulders, the angle at which he held his face. He struck a match against the side of a box and lit a cigarette, cupping his whole hand over his mouth when he drew the cigarette to his lips. The houseboy brought out biscuits and tea.

They overlooked the intersection, from four flights above. They stood beside one another, both of them leaning into the railing. Together they took in the stone buildings, with their decrepit grandeur, that lined the streets. Their tired columns, their crumbling cornices, their sullied shades.

Her face was supported by the discreet barrier of her hand. his arm hung over the edge, the burning cigarette was in his fingers. The sleeves of his Punjabi were rolled up, exposing the veins running from his wrist to the crook of the elbow. They were prominent, the blood in them greenish gray, like a pointed archway below the skin.

There was something elemental about so many human beings in motion at once: walking, sitting in buses and trams, pulling or being pulled along in rickshaws. One the other side of the street were a few gold and silver shops all in a row, with mirrored walls and ceilings. Always crowded with families, endlessly reflected, placing orders for wedding jewels. There was the press where they took clothes to be ironed. The store where Gauri bought her ink, her notebooks. Narrow sweet shops, where trays of confections were studded with flies.

The paanwallah sat cross-legged at one corner, under a bare bulb, spreading white lime paste on stacks of betel leaves. A traffic constable stood at the center, in his helmet, on his little box. Blowing a whistle and waving his arms. The clamor of so many motors, of so many scooters and lorries and busses and cars, filled their ears.

I like this view, he said.
Copyright © 2013 by Jhumpa Lahiri. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • FINALIST | 2013
    National Book Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • A Time Top Fiction Book • An NPR "Great Read" • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A USA Today Best Book • A People magazine Top 10 Book • A Barnes and Noble Best New Book • A Good Reads Best Book • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Slate Favorite Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book • An Apple Top 10 Book

“Poised, haunting, exquisitely effective storytelling. . . . Lahiri is one of our most beautiful chroniclers of the aching disjunctions of emigration and family.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Exquisite. . . . Lahiri explores here what she has always explored best: the fragile inner workings of her characters. . . . An American master.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Lahiri’s] finest work so far. . . . At once unsettling and generous. . . . Shattering and satisfying in equal measure.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Poignant. . . . There is an important truth here—that life often denies us understanding, and sometimes all there is to hold on to is our ability to endure.”
—NPR

“Intriguing. . . . Brim[s] with pain and love and all of life’s profound beauty.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Mesmerizing.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“In The Lowland, we are all emigrants, not from one country to another but from the present to the future. . . . Tremendous.”
—Lev Grossman, Time

“A masterful work that shines with brilliant language. . . . [Lahiri] has created a masterpiece.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lahiri is an elegant stylist, effortlessly placing the perfect words in the perfect order time and again so we’re transported seamlessly into another place.”
—Vanity Fair

“Divided consciousness has been Lahiri’s recurrent theme. . . . This time, Lahiri daringly redraws the map. . . . [Her] prose is blunter, less mellifluous: here worlds, new and old, contain terrors.”
—The Atlantic

“A classic story of family and ideology at odds, love and risk closely twined. . . . An author, at the height of her artistry, spins the globe and comes full circle.”
—Vogue

“A great American writer.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Memorable, potent. . . . Lahiri has reached literary high ground with The Lowland.”
—USA Today

“A master of dramatic turns, but not in the conventional sense. She lets tension build slowly until something snaps. What she twists is you. . . . Lahiri shows that a twist can be even more devastating when you’ve been afraid that it might happen all along. A”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A must-read. . . . Delivers Lahiri’s trademark lyrical prose woven with a fast-paced narrative and indelible characters.”
—Slate

“Lahiri returns confidently to the themes that have earned her critical praise, an eager audience and a Pulitzer Prize. . . . [Here] she adds a historical dimension that creates a vital, intriguing backdrop. . . . [The] story is unique, but it’s also universal, a reminder of the past’s pull on us all.”
—The Miami Herald

“Expansive and intimate. . . . Lahiri’s writing is precise and restrained. . . . Loyalty and betrayal, lies and forgiveness, filial responsibility and abandonment, the choices and sacrifices we make to find our way in the world are beautifully wrought in this novel.”
—The Oregonian

“Subtle but devastating. . . . 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

“The kind of book that stays with you long after you finish it. . . . Full of sharp insights about marriage and parenthood, politics and commitment.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Delicately harrowing. . . . Lahiri has a devastatingly keen ear for the tensions and misunderstandings endemic in our closest relationships.”
—Bloomberg News

About

Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Finalist for the National Book Award
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book; A Time Top Fiction Book; An NPR "Great Read"; A Chicago Tribune Best Book; A USA Today Best Book; A People magazine Top 10 Book; A Barnes and Noble Best New Book; A Good Reads Best Book; A Kirkus Best Fiction Book; A Slate Favorite Book; A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book; An Apple Top 10 Book

The Lowland is an engrossing family saga steeped in history: the story of two very different brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn apart by revolution, and a love that endures long past death. Moving from the 1960s to the present, and from India to America and across generations, this dazzling novel is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.

“Poised, haunting, exquisitely effective storytelling. . . . Lahiri is one of our most beautiful chroniclers of the aching disjunctions of emigration and family.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Exquisite. . . . Lahiri explores here what she has always explored best: the fragile inner workings of her characters. . . . An American master.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Lahiri’s] finest work so far. . . . At once unsettling and generous. . . . Shattering and satisfying in equal measure.” —The New York Review of Books

“Poignant. . . . There is an important truth here—that life often denies us understanding, and sometimes all there is to hold on to is our ability to endure.” —NPR

“Intriguing. . . . Brim[s] with pain and love and all of life’s profound beauty.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Mesmerizing.” —The Washington Post Book World

“In The Lowland, we are all emigrants, not from one country to another but from the present to the future. . . . Tremendous.” —Lev Grossman, Time 

“A masterful work that shines with brilliant language. . . . [Lahiri] has created a masterpiece.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lahiri is an elegant stylist, effortlessly placing the perfect words in the perfect order time and again so we’re transported seamlessly into another place.” —Vanity Fair

“Divided consciousness has been Lahiri’s recurrent theme. . . . This time, Lahiri daringly redraws the map. . . . [Her] prose is blunter, less mellifluous: here worlds, new and old, contain terrors.”
—The Atlantic

“The lowland [of the title] serves as Lahiri’s telling metaphor for the dark, dank, weedy places that haunt our lives. . . . In its quiet intensity, [The Lowland] reminds us of the triumphant fiction of Alice Munro and William Trevor.” —Newsday

“A classic story of family and ideology at odds, love and risk closely twined. . . . An author, at the height of her artistry, spins the globe and comes full circle.” —Vogue

“A great American writer.” —Chicago Tribune

“Memorable, potent. . . . Lahiri has reached literary high ground with The Lowland.” —USA Today

“A master of dramatic turns, but not in the conventional sense. She lets tension build slowly until something snaps. What she twists is you. . . . Lahiri shows that a twist can be even more devastating when you’ve been afraid that it might happen all along. A” —Entertainment Weekly

“A must-read. . . . Delivers Lahiri’s trademark lyrical prose woven with a fast-paced narrative and indelible characters.” —Slate

“Lahiri returns confidently to the themes that have earned her critical praise, an eager audience and a Pulitzer Prize. . . . [Here] she adds a historical dimension that creates a vital, intriguing backdrop. . . . [The] story is unique, but it’s also universal, a reminder of the past’s pull on us all.” —The Miami Herald

“Expansive and intimate. . . . Lahiri’s writing is precise and restrained. . . . Loyalty and betrayal, lies and forgiveness, filial responsibility and abandonment, the choices and sacrifices we make to find our way in the world are beautifully wrought in this novel.” —The Oregonian

“Subtle but devastating. . . . 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

“The kind of book that stays with you long after you finish it. . . . Full of sharp insights about marriage and parenthood, politics and commitment.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Delicately harrowing. . . . Lahiri has a devastatingly keen ear for the tensions and
misunderstandings endemic in our closest relationships.” —Bloomberg News

Author

© Laura Sciacovelli
JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. 

jhumpalahiri.net View titles by Jhumpa Lahiri

Excerpt

Normally she stayed on the balcony, reading, or kept to an adjacent room as her brother and Udayan studied and smoked and drank cups of tea. Manash had befriended him at Calcutta University, where they were both graduate students in the physics department. Much of the time their books on the behaviors of liquids and gases would sit ignored as they talked about the repercussions of Naxalbari, and commented on the day’s events.

The discussions strayed to the insurgencies in Indochina and in Latin American countries. In the case of Cuba it wasn’t even a mass movement, Udayan pointed out. Just a small group, attacking the right targets.

All over the world students were gaining momentum, standing up to exploitative systems. It was another example of Newton’s second law of motion, he joked. Force equals mass times acceleration.

Manash was skeptical. What could they, urban students, claim to know about peasant life?

Nothing, Udayan said. We need to learn from them.

Through an open doorway she saw him. Tall but slight of build, twenty-three but looking a bit older. His clothing hung on him loosely. He wore kurtas but also European-style shirts, irreverently, the top portion unbuttoned, the bottom untucked, the sleeves rolled back past the elbow.

He sat in the room where they listened to the radio. On the bed that served as a sofa where, at night, Gauri slept. His arms were lean, his fingers too long for the small porcelain cups of tea her family served him, which he drained in just a few gulps. His hair was wavy, the brows thick, the eyes languid and dark.

His hands seemed an extension of his voice, always in motion, embellishing the things he said. Even as he argued he smiled easily. His upper teeth overlapped slightly, as if there were one too many of them. From the beginning, the attraction was there.

He never said anything to Gauri if she happened to brush by. Never glancing, never acknowledging that she was Manash’s younger sister, until the day the houseboy was out on an errand, and Manash asked Gauri if she minded making them some tea.

She could not find a tray to put the teacups on. She carried them in, nudging open the door to the room with her shoulder.
Looking up at her an instant longer than he needed to, Udayan took his cup from her hands.

The groove between his mouth and nose was deep. Clean-shaven. Still looking at her, he posed his first question.

Where do you study? he asked.

*
Because she went to Presidency, and Calcutta University was just next door, she searched for him on the quadrangle, and among the bookstalls, at the tables of the Coffee House if she went there with a group of friends. Something told her he did not go to his classes as regularly as she did. She began to watch for him from the generous balcony that wrapped around the two sides of her grandparents’ flat, overlooking the intersection where Cornwallis Street began. It became something for her to do.

Then one day she spotted him, amazed that she knew which of the hundreds of dark heads was his. He was standing on the opposite corner, buying a packet of cigarettes. Then he was crossing the street, a cotton book bag over his shoulder, glancing both ways, walking toward their flat.

She crouched below the filigree, under the clothes drying on the line, worried that he would look up and see her. Two minutes later she heard footsteps climbing the stairwell, and then the rattle of the iron knocker on the door of the flat. She heard the door being opened, the houseboy letting him in.

It was an afternoon everyone, including Manash, happened to be out, and she’d been reading, alone. She wondered if he’d turn back, given that Manash wasn’t there. Instead, a moment later, he stepped out onto the balcony.

No one else here? he asked.

She shook her head.

Will you talk to me, then?

The laundry was damp, some of her petticoats and blouses were clipped to the line. The material of the blouses was tailored to the shape of her upper torso, her breasts. He unclipped one of the blouses and put it further down the line to make room.

He did this slowly, a mild tremor in his fingers forcing him to focus more than another person might on the task. Standing beside him, she was aware of his height, the slight stoop in his shoulders, the angle at which he held his face. He struck a match against the side of a box and lit a cigarette, cupping his whole hand over his mouth when he drew the cigarette to his lips. The houseboy brought out biscuits and tea.

They overlooked the intersection, from four flights above. They stood beside one another, both of them leaning into the railing. Together they took in the stone buildings, with their decrepit grandeur, that lined the streets. Their tired columns, their crumbling cornices, their sullied shades.

Her face was supported by the discreet barrier of her hand. his arm hung over the edge, the burning cigarette was in his fingers. The sleeves of his Punjabi were rolled up, exposing the veins running from his wrist to the crook of the elbow. They were prominent, the blood in them greenish gray, like a pointed archway below the skin.

There was something elemental about so many human beings in motion at once: walking, sitting in buses and trams, pulling or being pulled along in rickshaws. One the other side of the street were a few gold and silver shops all in a row, with mirrored walls and ceilings. Always crowded with families, endlessly reflected, placing orders for wedding jewels. There was the press where they took clothes to be ironed. The store where Gauri bought her ink, her notebooks. Narrow sweet shops, where trays of confections were studded with flies.

The paanwallah sat cross-legged at one corner, under a bare bulb, spreading white lime paste on stacks of betel leaves. A traffic constable stood at the center, in his helmet, on his little box. Blowing a whistle and waving his arms. The clamor of so many motors, of so many scooters and lorries and busses and cars, filled their ears.

I like this view, he said.
Copyright © 2013 by Jhumpa Lahiri. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • FINALIST | 2013
    National Book Award Finalist

Praise

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • A Time Top Fiction Book • An NPR "Great Read" • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A USA Today Best Book • A People magazine Top 10 Book • A Barnes and Noble Best New Book • A Good Reads Best Book • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Slate Favorite Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book • An Apple Top 10 Book

“Poised, haunting, exquisitely effective storytelling. . . . Lahiri is one of our most beautiful chroniclers of the aching disjunctions of emigration and family.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Exquisite. . . . Lahiri explores here what she has always explored best: the fragile inner workings of her characters. . . . An American master.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Lahiri’s] finest work so far. . . . At once unsettling and generous. . . . Shattering and satisfying in equal measure.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Poignant. . . . There is an important truth here—that life often denies us understanding, and sometimes all there is to hold on to is our ability to endure.”
—NPR

“Intriguing. . . . Brim[s] with pain and love and all of life’s profound beauty.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Mesmerizing.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“In The Lowland, we are all emigrants, not from one country to another but from the present to the future. . . . Tremendous.”
—Lev Grossman, Time

“A masterful work that shines with brilliant language. . . . [Lahiri] has created a masterpiece.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lahiri is an elegant stylist, effortlessly placing the perfect words in the perfect order time and again so we’re transported seamlessly into another place.”
—Vanity Fair

“Divided consciousness has been Lahiri’s recurrent theme. . . . This time, Lahiri daringly redraws the map. . . . [Her] prose is blunter, less mellifluous: here worlds, new and old, contain terrors.”
—The Atlantic

“A classic story of family and ideology at odds, love and risk closely twined. . . . An author, at the height of her artistry, spins the globe and comes full circle.”
—Vogue

“A great American writer.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Memorable, potent. . . . Lahiri has reached literary high ground with The Lowland.”
—USA Today

“A master of dramatic turns, but not in the conventional sense. She lets tension build slowly until something snaps. What she twists is you. . . . Lahiri shows that a twist can be even more devastating when you’ve been afraid that it might happen all along. A”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A must-read. . . . Delivers Lahiri’s trademark lyrical prose woven with a fast-paced narrative and indelible characters.”
—Slate

“Lahiri returns confidently to the themes that have earned her critical praise, an eager audience and a Pulitzer Prize. . . . [Here] she adds a historical dimension that creates a vital, intriguing backdrop. . . . [The] story is unique, but it’s also universal, a reminder of the past’s pull on us all.”
—The Miami Herald

“Expansive and intimate. . . . Lahiri’s writing is precise and restrained. . . . Loyalty and betrayal, lies and forgiveness, filial responsibility and abandonment, the choices and sacrifices we make to find our way in the world are beautifully wrought in this novel.”
—The Oregonian

“Subtle but devastating. . . . 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

“The kind of book that stays with you long after you finish it. . . . Full of sharp insights about marriage and parenthood, politics and commitment.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Delicately harrowing. . . . Lahiri has a devastatingly keen ear for the tensions and misunderstandings endemic in our closest relationships.”
—Bloomberg News

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