Author(s): Jhumpa Lahiri

Novel | Italy | India | Translated fiction

The woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, through its shops and pools and bars. She slows her pace to watch a couple fighting, to take in the sight of an old woman in a waiting room; pauses to drink her coffee in a shaded square. Sometimes her steps take her to her grieving mother, sealed off in her own solitude. Sometimes they take her to the station, where the trains can spirit her away for a short while. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change forever. A rare work of fiction, Whereabouts - first written in Italian and then translated by the author herself - brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. A dazzling evocation of a city, it captures a woman standing on one of life's thresholds, reflecting on what has been lost and facing, with equal hope and rage, what may lie ahead.  

Review: One of the most interesting American writers at work today ... Whereabouts feels like her answer to Matisse's cut-outs: she has taken her writing apart and reconstructed it, sparely, to make something new, where silence matters ... If the antidote to a year of solitude and trauma is art, then this novel is the answer. It is superb * SUNDAY TIMES *
Elegantly done, a portrait veiled in quiet melancholy, but which still celebrates the unexpected joys of the quotidian, and how much more sharply you can appreciate them when alone * THE TIMES *
Insightful, elegant prose exposing the faults that make us human * I NEWS *
Addictive ... Sometimes we're in the mood for intimate novels exploring the intricacies of human emotion ... Quietly mesmerising * STYLIST *
So timely ... Takes daring and to my mind beautiful risks with structure and plot -- ELIZABETH DAY * BBC Radio 4 Open Book *
Its sentences are honed to minimalist beauty ... The most exciting moments of the novel are when it becomes a novel of thinking, when it dives down into its sharp, provocative fragments -- MADELEINE THIEN * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW *
A beautifully poised exploration of an interior life * DAILY MAIL *
Each chapter an espresso shot of regret and loneliness ... This is a book about belonging and not belonging, place and displacement * GUARDIAN *

Author Biography: Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of non-fiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole. Whereabouts is Lahiri's first novel written in Italian and translated by her into English. www.jhumpalahiri.net