Desirable Daughters

Newsday

Multicultural reality limned by Bharati Mukherjee with aculty, humor, and warmth.

New York Times

Her most thoughtful, emotionally detailed book yet.

Washington Post

Mukherjee has emerged as an exemplary author(Washington Post)

USA Today

Llyrical and insightful, sharing observations about family that apply to almost all cultures.

NY Times Book Review

A page turner.

Russell Banks

Desirable Daughters,with its broadband vision of history and geography,is [Mukherjee's] finest novel so far.

William Kennedy

A beautifully written family story of the eternal pull of ancient Indian tradition on even the most contemporary of lives.

Robert Olen Butler

Mukherjee is writing achingly compassionate, ravishingly beautiful, absolutely essential books. And Desirable Daughters is one of her best.

Elle Magazine

Evocative,richly layered sixth novel.

Publishers Weekly

HIt should take nothing away from the achievements of new young writers of South Asian origin to state that Mukherjee eclipses all of them in her new novel, the highlight of her career to date. Only a writer with mature vision, a sense of history and a long-nurtured observation of the Indo-American community could have created this absorbing tale of two rapidly changing cultures and the flash points where they intersect. The narrator, 36-year-old Tara Chatterjee, was born into comfort and privilege in Calcutta. She and her two sisters are part of a close knit, snobbish Brahmin Bengali family, and the girls are raised to marry well. Tara, however, has brought shame to the family by divorcing her multimillionaire husband, Bish, and moving with their teenage son, Rabi, to Atherton, Calif., where the sudden intrusion of the past into her and her sisters' lives is only the first tremor of an earthquake that will undermine their safe assumptions. The narrative succeeds brilliantly in interweaving several themes of class, history and changing consciousness. Beneath the family drama and Tara's quest for her identity, Mukherjee tells a larger story about Indians in India and the U.S., painting a complex picture of vastly different cultures Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, Sikh further divided by substratas of caste and ancient prejudices, yet kept together by strict rules of family behavior and spiritual rituals. Finally, there's a very real current of danger running through the narrative that explodes into violence and irrevocable change. With remarkable dexterity, Mukherjee depicts tradition and myth colliding with the free will and dynamics of a one-world economy. Winner of the NBCC Award for The Middleman, Mukherjee has always been considered a significant writer. Here she bursts out as a star. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The complex plot of this novel by the award-winning Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) centers on three sisters of a Brahmin Indian family whose lives have diverged over the years; the youngest, Tara, has in fact moved to California. When Tara is approached by a young man claiming to be her nephew, a family secret is finally revealed, unleashing a sophisticated, gang-driven plot to kill or kidnap various family members. While Tara strains to unravel one mystery, new revelations surface, until she is forced to reevaluate everything she thought she knew. Artfully conveying the complexities of Indian society, philosophy and religion in India and the United States, Mukherjee's writing is rich, deep, and compelling, and her characters are well rounded and believable. Recommended for most collections. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Mukherjee (Leave It to Me, 1997, etc.) offers a striking portrait of three sisters living in two worlds: the traditional Brahmin society of upper-class Calcutta, where they were born, and the secular world of the modern West they moved to as adults. Tara, who narrates, left Calcutta happily enough as a young woman and has rarely looked back. The youngest of three daughters of a Brahmin engineer and landowner, she grew up among the Bengali elite in an atmosphere that wavered between Hindu traditionalism and secular technocracy. Well-educated, she was married to an Indian computer designer who moved her to California and got rich in Silicon Valley. Tara became Americanized enough to divorce her husband after a few years and move to San Francisco with her son. There, however, she found herself brought sharply back to Calcutta when a young man named Chris Dey showed up at her door one day claiming to be the illegitimate son of her older sister Padma and bearing a letter of introduction from Ron Dey (a childhood friend of Padma's), who claimed to be the boy's father. But Padma, now a New York clothing designer, knows nothing of the boy, while Ron Dey, back in India, admits that the boy is his, but not by Padma-and denies ever sending him or a letter. The mystery deepens when Tara goes to the police, who ascertain that the boy isn't really Chris Dey but an imposter using his passport. Meanwhile, Tara finds she's being stalked by a Bengali gangster, and her ex-husband becomes implicated in a cyberterrorism threat by Indian hackers who say they'll unleash a supervirus that could disable every hard-drive in the US. Forget not going home again-sometimes you can't get away in the first place, evenhalfway across the globe. A nice hybrid, combining the suspense of a good thriller with the atmosphere and texture of a family epic.