Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Lowland” among Time’s top 10

By Arun Kumar

Washington, Dec (IANS) Pulitzer Prize winning Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, “The Lowland”, set in Kolkata of the 1960s, has been listed fourth in Time magazine’s top ten books of fiction in 2013.

Describing it as “a life-spanning novel about two brothers from Calcutta,” Time said: “Lahiri’s graceful, measured prose ticks off the years and registers, precisely and with deep pathos, the strange, surprising, melancholy and very occasionally wonderful changes that time wreaks on us all.”

“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson, “Tenth of December” by George Saunders and “The Flamethrowers” by Rachel Kushner take the top three slots ahead of Lahiri’s novel.

New York Times also lists “The Lowland” among 100 Notable Books of 2013. “After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently written novel,” it notes.

In! dian-American author Anita Raghavan’s “The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund” too makes it to the newspaper’s 100 in nonfiction category.

“Indian-Americans populate every aspect of this meticulously reported true-life business thriller,” it notes.

Lahiri last month failed to win the 2013 US National Book Award in fiction losing out to author James McBride for “The Good Lord Bird”, about the journey of a young slave in the 1850s. London-born daughter of immigrants from West Bengal, 46-year-old Lahiri, who lives in New York’s Brooklyn had also lost out on the prestigious Man Booker Prize for contemporary fiction writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland.

She is the author of three previous books. Her debut collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies”, won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award.