Whereabouts - Jhumpa Lahiri

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, its 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.

'An unusual literary and linguistic feat' NEW YORK TIMES

About The Author

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award,The New Yorker Debut of the Year, and an Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles TimesBook Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was a New York Times Book Review,Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, and People Magazine Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Story Prize, and winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her most recent book is her second novel,The Lowland (published September 2013). A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.