The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

- Google

The 508th greatest fiction book of all time


This book is on the following lists:

  1. - 66th on Top 100 World Literature Titles (Perfection Learning)
  2. - Modern classics: 11 novels that belong in the classroom (Today.com)
  3. - 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (The Book)

Buy This Book

Name Binding Sales Rank Lowest New Lowest Used Published
The Namesake: A Novel Kindle Edition 6240 $8.02 2004
The Namesake: A Novel Paperback 476183 $4.01 $1.32 2004
The Namesake: A Novel (Edition Reprint) by Lahiri, Jhumpa [Paperback(2004£©] Paperback 2414284 $6.10 $4.14 2003
The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook) Hardcover 7042460 $3.16 $3.07 2006
The Namesake Hardcover 1625624 $45.99 $7.99 2004
The Namesake Paperback 2125907 $12.00 $0.38 2007
The Namesake: A Novel Hardcover 1799235 $7.00 $1.61 2003
The Namesake Audio CD 1681093 $59.93 $23.99 2006
Interpreter of Maladies Hardcover 133455 $65.83 $8.55 2000
Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies & The Namesake Paperback 8356454 $23.00 $4.99
Lahiri's The Namesake (The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (Paperback - Sept. 1, 2004)) Paperback 1346896 $4.95 $2.10 2003
Interpreter of Maladies Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Hardcover 965180 $28.66 $6.54
The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film Based on the Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebooks) Hardcover 2585034 $0.51 $0.16 2006
The Namesakev Paperback 1590988 $4.53 $0.01
The Namesake: A Novel Paperback 88819 $11.28 $3.35 2019
Interpreter of Maladies Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Hardcover 8178748 $57.00 $15.09
The Namesake Paperback 1785645 $8.82 $0.65 2004
The Namesake: A Novel Paperback 1945 $3.46 $0.01 2004
The Namesake Hardcover 658274 $32.78 $1.55 2003
The Namesake Audio CD 528678 $10.94 $11.16 2013
The Namesake: A Novel By Jhumpa Lahiri Paperback 389814 $8.05 $3.85 2003