The Namesake: A Novel

· HarperCollins
4.2
92 reviews
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” (The New York Times)

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world — conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
"Dazzling...An intimate, closely observed family portrait."—The New York Times
"Hugely appealing."—People Magazine
"An exquisitely detailed family saga."—Entertainment Weekly

Ratings and reviews

4.2
92 reviews
Fawn-Marie Golden
February 1, 2015
A great peak into the lives of a new Bangladesh family to America through the awkward and often challenging changes from one generation to the next. I have a greater appreciation for immigration and the lives in transition. Wonderfully detailed yet never boring, always fluid. A page-turner! I highly recommend.
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Jeffrey Sagan
March 16, 2015
Overall well written. Readers are encaptivated by the overall surprising and endering events that have so much underlying meaning. If you enjoy good tails of the lives of seemingly ordinary people this is a good choice.
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A Google user
January 2, 2012
The short stories mostly didn't end the way I anticipated but I still really enjoyed this book and had a hard time putting it down until I was finished.
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About the author

JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani (Roman Stories). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

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