Unaccustomed Earth

One sentence synopsis... Eight stories - some interwoven, most not - of people transplanted from their homes and setting down new roots in foreign environments.

Read it if you like... Jane Austen - for the forensic precision into family habits, customs, and pressures with love versus arranged marriage plots.

Further reading... anything by Lahiri. She circles the same themes of the immigrant experience and family disconnect between generations in every book but every time gets closer and closer to literary perfection.

Unaccustomed Earth is Lahiri's third book, with two collections of short stories and one novel. She seems to know the immigrant experience, the loneliness, the out-of-sync feeling with the rest of the world. Her characters try to form new bonds and try to change to fit the new world in which they are living. The title comes from a Hawthorne quote that promotes the benefits moving into new soil, both for plants and for people. These benefits are subtle in the stories presented here and only occur after an initial crisis of transplanting takes place.