Whereabouts
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INTERNATIONAL and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A captivating novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a decade.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. Lahiri's narrator, a woman questioning her place in the world, wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor--traversing the streets around her house and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband's untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman's path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.
This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri's work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, elegantly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
About this Author
JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of five works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland, and Whereabouts; 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.
Reviews
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE INDEPENDENT (UK)
"A linguistic tour-de-force, Chekhovian in its brevity, Whereabouts is a novel about place in an abstract sense. A solitary woman in the lonely landscape of an unnamed city, muses on life & love. A hauntingly evocative tale." --Galway Public Libraries, Ireland, the Dublin Literary Award 2022 longlist
"A meditative and aching snapshot of a life in suspension... Lahiri's poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display. This beautifully written portrait of a life in passage captures the hopes, frustrations, and longings of solitude and remembrance."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In [Whereabouts'] brief, almost airy entries . . . sentences are honed to minimalist beauty. . . . It's a beautiful translation. . . . The most exciting moments of Whereabouts are when it becomes a novel of thinking, when it dives down into its sharp fragments . . . paring language down to a minimalist power. . . . [The] language glides." --Madeleine Thien, The New York Times
"[F]ew [names] have become as synonymous with the pain and complexity of being human as 'Jhumpa'. . . . All of her writing has translated pain into words, a decades-long attempt to interpret a feeling into something more tactile. . . . [A] deft communicator of the alienation and loss that comes with immigration. . . . [Whereabouts is] a beautiful and brief novella, proof that Lahiri can do searing and intimate fiction rooted in the Bengali experience, as well as an aloof Rachel Cusk-type narrative about the despair of being alive. . . . Lahiri sees the world in a way I wish I could, with a clarity I yearn for." --Scaachi Koul, BuzzFeed
"[Whereabouts'] spare, reflective prose and profound interiority recall the work of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez. . . . Elegant, subtle, and sad." --Kirkus Reviews
"[A]n audacious experiment in language and tone. . . . Whereabouts oscillates between belonging and unbelonging . . . mark[ing] the arc of a breathtaking literary ambition: to live between languages and worlds, and to shape a tongue that is distinctly her own . . . [i]n prose that has been chiselled down to perfection. . . . Lahiri's spare, evocative prose and the incredible detailing of the protagonist's observation appears like a cornucopia." --The Indian Express
"Lahiri, being one of the greatest modern-day stylists of minimal realism, dexterously encapsulates in her spare prose the existential angst of her solitary protagonist. . . . Grief, incertitude, hope. Lahiri captures it all, confirming her as a writer of extraordinary range and much in command of human sympathy." --Dawn (Pakistan)
"From the very first episode, there is an overwhelming confidence in the execution of this work. Not one word is wasted. A total absence of exposition ensures each microfiction is surgically edited to its barest, most beautiful bones. And yet there is a warmth here that encourages great affection for the anonymous narrator. Written with intelligence, elegance, empathy and hypnotic power, Whereabouts is destined to become a book of the year." --The Irish Times
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