After the assassination of her husband, seventeen-year-old Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of the past.

Bharati Mukherjee Is One Of The Major Novelists Of Indian Diaspora Who Have Achieved Enviable Positions Within A Comparatively Short Creative Span. As An Expatriate In The United States, She Has Captured Evocatively The Indian Immigrant Experience In Her Five Novels And Two Collections Of Short-Fiction. The Creative Odyssey That Started With The Tiger S Daughter (1972) And Produced Leave It To Me (1997) Recently Has Kept Her Seriously Involved In Exploring The Complexities Of Cross-Cultural Interactions.The Present Volume Is The First Full-Length Study Of Mukherjee S Creative Corpus From A Cross-Cultural Perspective. The Book, Divided In Six Chapters, Opens With An Exhaustive Account Of The Major Concepts Of Culture And It Ingeniously Traces The Nature Of Formative Influences On Her Psyche In The Second Chapter. Mukherjee S Fiction Has Been Examined In Three Well-Marked Phases Expatriation, Transition, Immigration In Three Substantive Chapters. The Quality Of Cultural Conflict In All Its Multiplicity Forms The Crux Of Her Accomplishments As A Creative Artist. She Has An Esteemed Place In The Luminous Galaxy Of Indian Men Of Letters Writing Abroad With Native Ethos Providing Them A Living Ambience. The Fiction Of Bharati Mukherjee : A Cultural Perspective Marks A Milestone In The Critical Scholarship On The Third World Literature.

A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile . . . profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture’s traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).

Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, 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, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger -- and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in. In this, her first novel, Mukherjee claimed as her subject the shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformation that are part of the immigrant experience -- a theme she has masterfully woven into her subsequent novels, Wife and Jasmine, and into The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Amy Tan says of Bharati Mukherjee's previous novel The Holder of the World, 'An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling'. Desirable Daughters maintains the strong literary muscle and the tenderness of narrative that we now expect from this prizewinning author.

Taken under the wing of an expat teacher for her ambition and talent, Anjali Bose hopes to escape unfavorable prospects and falls in with a crowd of young people in Bangalore, where she endeavors to confront her past and reinvent herself.

“An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative.”—Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography....”