The Bookshelf of Emily J.

I’ve been a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri’s since reading her first novel The Namesake (2003), and I moved from there to her short stories, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). I will read anything she writes. So when her second novel The Lowland (2013) came out last year, I jumped at the chance to read it. I quickly put my name on the library list, and then I had to wait many months to actually get my hands on it. It was worth the wait.

The novel is about two brothers, born around World War II. Udayan becomes a Naxalite Communist in India in the 1960s, while the Subhash goes to Rhode Island for school. He stays in the United States and earns a Ph.D., eventually marrying his brother’s wife! It is an interesting and tragic twist of fate. His brother is arrested and executed for being…