Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel to hit book stores in September

Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri is set to publish her second novel 'The Lowland', on September 24, 2013. Set in both India and America, The Lowland' is a story of fate and will, exile and return, of the price of idealism and of a love that can last long past death. This is the Pulitzer Prize winner's first full-length novel since the award-winning 'The Namesake.'

 

"The Lowland" is about the lives of brothers Subhash and Udayan. Born just 15 months apart, they are inseparable and are often mistaken for each other in the Kolkata neighbourhood where they grow up. But they are opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and the charismatic and impulsive Udayan finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother`s political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. 

 

But when Subhash learns what has happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family`s home, he goes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind – including those seared in the heart of his brother`s wife.

 

"I began to concieve this novel in 1997, before the events if the September 11th took place. But I spent years simply working on one scene, and running around, and eventually setting it aside", Jhumpa said in a recent interview with The New Yorker.

 

"I began working on the book in earnest in 2008, but to be honest, I was not thinking of what had happened in New York as I was trying to conjure Calcutta during the Naxalite period. While I was writing the book I felt that I needed to seal myself off, temporally speaking. On the other hand, during those years I was living in New York City, and part of my everyday consciousness was informed by the aftermath, physical and emotional, of September 11th and the awareness that other attacks could take place. It wasn't until just a few months ago, when I learned about the Boston Marathon bombings, that it struck me that those brothers could have been a version, forty years on, of Udayan and his comrades. One difference is that Udayan and his comrades wanted to create a revolution, whereas the brothers in Boston seemed to want only to cause harm," she added.

 

Expoectations will be high for Lahiri, who won Pulitzer Prize for  her first book, :Interpreter of Maladies," and once described by the Financial Times as "probably the most influential writer of fiction in America."