Bharati Mukherjee's Books
May.17.2011
From the author:
I grew up in Kolkata, India, in a large and loving, traditionally patriarchal Hindu family, headed by my father. Though my father was not the eldest male in the extended Mukherjee family, he had been co-opted as patriarch because he was the most educated, and had founded a prosperous pharmaceutical company. I watched my father accustom himself to the...
Mar.12.2003
Desirable Daughters, by the prolific writer Bharati Mukherjee, whose short story collection The Middleman won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, is a masterful meditation on marriage and family ties. It begins on a fantastic note: on a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, the narrator’s ancestor, five-year-old Tara Lata, is married to a tree after her thirteen...
Nov.01.1998
Debby DiMartino: saved from death in infancy by Gray Nuns at an Indian desert outpost; adopted as a toddler by Manfred and Serena DiMartino of Schenectady, New York; coming of age an inherently exotic girl in an inherently American town, never sure if she was someone special or just a special kind of misfit. Now, at twenty-three, she’s decided that it’s time to find out: time to...
Sep.29.1996
Born in Calcutta and schooled in the United States, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return—seething with strikes, riots, and unrest—is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world—that of her father,...
Oct.01.1995
Days and Nights in Calcutta is a candid look at the dizzying complexities and contradictions of Indian life told from two very different points of view. In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year in India with her family. Clark came as a Westerner, a stranger in a strange land trying to adjust to a large upper-class Indian family and to a...
Sep.01.1994
In her luminous new novel, Bharati Mukherjee creates a vivid, complex tale about the dislocation and transformation that arise in the face of a meeting of cultures: the terrain she has so brilliantly made her own in her acclaimed novels and stories. Here, in the Holder of the World, we witness an unlikely and intriguing meeting of two worlds, the Puritan American and the Mughal...
Feb.23.1992
“Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads.” So begins the wry story of an obedient daughter of middle-class Indian parents who is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Driven first to shock and then to despair, Dimple lives in a waking dream. And when her fantasies take a violent turn,...
Sep.01.1989
Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded in creating a kind of impressionistic fable, a prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today.
Jul.01.1988
These beautifully wrought stories reveal a new world that has been created imperceptibly in our midst: a United States transformed by many new faces from Afghanistan and Asia, from Uganda and Latin America. These immigrants have in turn been transformed by the “idea” of living in America. Passionate, comic, violent, and ultimately tender, these stories portray our latest arrivals...
Jun.01.1987
Bharati Mukherjee and her husband Clark Blaise wrote this book about the 1985 terrorist bombing that downed an Air India jetliner over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland, killing 329 people, most of whom were Canadian citizens. The incident has been the subject of continuing controversy.
Nov.16.1985
At once sly and tragic, these twelve extraordinary stories chart the complex and shifting lives of the new immigrants to America—some helpless, some hopeless, others ambitious, beautiful, all striving for something they can’t quite name, something more...
India, past and present, its inhabitants and expatriates, has always formed the framework of Mukherjee’s literary world. In this vibrant novel, a sequel to Desirable Daughters and her best work to date, the author has fused history, mysticism, treachery and enduring love in a suspenseful story about the lingering effects of past secrets. Tara Chatterjee, the protagonist of the...
About Bharati
Of Bengali origin, Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, India. She later traveled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School, Kolkata. She received her...