NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER โข A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties.
โAnother masterstroke in a career already filled with them.โ โO, the Oprah Magazine
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her lifeโs journey, realizes that sheโs lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husbandโs untimely death. Among those who appear on this womanโs path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and โhim,โ a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sunโs vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.
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This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiriโs work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.