In nine poignant stories spiked with humor and intelligence, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni captures lives at crossroad moments–caught between past and present, home and abroad, tradition and fresh experience.
A widow in California, recently arrived from India, struggles to adapt to a world in which neighbors are strangers and her domestic skills are deemed superfluous in the award-winning “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter.” In “The Intelligence of Wild Things,” a woman from Sacramento visits her brother in Vermont to inform him that back in Calcutta their mother is dying. And in the title story, a painter looks to ancient myth and the example of her grandmother for help in navigating her first real crisis of faith.
Knowing, compassionate and expertly rendered, the stories in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives depict the eternal struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the allure of change.
“Powerful…. Beautifully observed…. She arranges bouquets of sensual detail and crisply etches unspoken passions.”–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Authentic and complex…. Sophisticated and compassionate…. Moving…. [It is] a vision of what it means to be human, and in that resonance lies this collection’s triumph.”–The Washington Post
“Masterful…. Sophisticated…. Beautiful prose…. Divakaruni delivers poetic renderings of her characters’ thoughts and sensations as they think and feel their way around cultural obstacles and emotional snags.”–Chicago Tribune
“Divakaruni’s stories will touch everyone who reads them…. It is her gift for language and her ability to cast sentences of exquisite beauty that make her such a high-performance writer.”–USA Today
“Magical…. Each [story] is a clear, compressed gem of intelligence and insight…. Entertaining…beguiling…lyrical…poignant…. Divakaruni is one of our finest chroniclers of the trials of life among first-generation Americans…. Her prose style is elegantly and gracefully formed, intermingled with aphorisms, dreams, letters and moments of perfect imagery and metaphor…. Irresistible and seductive, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives is shaped by the voice of a true storyteller, each piece filled with private charm and wise empathy.”–The Oregonian
