Bharati Mukherjee

"When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its...

Anjali Bose sets off to Bangalore and quickly falls in with an ambitious crowd of young people, who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like "Seinfeld" in order to get jobs as call-center service agents. In this high-tech city, Anjali is able to confront her past and reinvent herself.

Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spun by Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism. They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee's portrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment serves to empower...