Desirable Daughters - Softcover

Mukherjee, Bharati

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006391710 ISBN 13: 9780006391715

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2002

Synopsis

They are three Calcutta-born sisters―intelligent, artistic and extremely independent. Born into a wealthy Brahmin family presided over by their doting father and his traditionalist mother, the girls feel strangled by a society with little regard for young women. Rebelling against family and convention, the girls’ heads and hearts take them in very different directions, where, in a clash of wills and circumstances, the inexorable bonds of their sisterhood will be tested as never before.

At the heart of this remarkable new novel by the award-winning author of The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine are the interwoven threads of culture, identity and family loyalty. In the tradition of The Joy Luck Club in its honest and compelling portrayal of the immigrant experience, Desirable Daughters is an unputdownable read.

About this title

Review:

Desirable Daughters, by the prolific writer Bharati Mukherjee, whose short story collection The Middleman won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, is a masterful meditation on marriage and family ties. It begins on a fantastic note: on a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, the narrator's ancestor, 5-year-old Tara Lata, is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when Tara, the 36-year-old narrator, returns to this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Like her ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee is the youngest of three sisters of a Brahmin family. Although they grew up in Calcutta, Tara and the oldest sister now live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara was married (in an arranged marriage) at age 19 to Bish Chatterjee, a genius who makes a fortune from a cutting-edge computer process. He and Tara are estranged when the novel opens, but when a stranger claiming kinship shows up at the house that Tara shares in San Francisco with her son and her boyfriend, she reconsiders her assumptions about her entire family. In the course of the novel, a sister's secret and a murder are uncovered, and a near-fatal bombing occurs. Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters is yet another of her magically written, compelling novels. --Susan Biskeborn

About the Author:

BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous essays on immigration and American culture and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989. Follow Bharati on Twitter @missnewindia and become a fan on Facebook.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0006391710
• ISBN 13: 9780006391715
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336