Pulitzer-winning scintillating studies in yearning & exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land & while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily & send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland Jhumpa Lahiri's prose is beautifully measured subtle & sober & she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid but this work is rich in observational detail evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here) & full of emotional pull & reverberation