The Namesake: A Novel

Jhumpa Lahiri

Sep 2004 · Sold by HarperCollins

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

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.

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.

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.

About the author

JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.