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Desireable Daughters
by Bharati Mukherjee
Hyperion, 2001
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(From the publisher) At the heart of this remarkable new novel by the award-winning author of The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine are issues of culture, identity, and familial loyalty. Comparable to The Joy Luck Club in its honest portrayal of the American immigrant experience, Desirable Daughters follows the diverging paths taken by three Calcutta-born sisters, raised at the highest rung of Brahmin culture, as they come of age in a changing world.
Tara, Padma, and Parvati Chatterjee were born into a wealthy Brahmin family presided over by their doting father and his traditionalist mother. Intelligent and artistic, the girls are nevertheless constrained by a society with little regard for women. Their subsequent rebellion will lead them in different directions, to different continents, and through different circumstances that strain yet ultimately strengthen their relationship. Tara finds herself years later away from her homeland raising her son as a single mother in California, while one sister is still in India and the other settled in New Jersey.
Mukherjee weaves a tale of mystery, personal choice, and family secrets with a precision and craft that keeps her readers at once awed at her skill and curious about the secrets of this wealthy and mysterious family. Moving from generation to generation, past and present, Mukherjee weaves a portrait of a modern yet tradition Indo-American family with a secret at its core and a loyalty to preserve its pride.
About the Author
Bharati Mukherjee is the author of five novels, two nonfiction books, and a collection of short stories, The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. |
