Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri: The Number One New York Times Bestseller.

These eight short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri are quiet, penetrating, and meticulously written. The first five stories are distinct, while the last three are interrelated. Lahiri’s prose seems so clean and precise that it is very easy to turn page after page. Each story delves into the psyche of each character with such skill that the reader can’t help but feel extremely intimate with each one.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic weekend takes a dark turn at a party. While in “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories, we follow the lives of a girl and boy who share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate. Sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose and emotional wisdom. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.

Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants. Each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.