Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth Synopsis

Knopf Canada is proud to welcome this bestselling, Pulitzer Prizewinning author with eight dazzling stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her gardenwhere she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself.

In A Choice of Accommodations, a couples romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In Only Goodness, a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in Hema and Kaushik, a trio of linked storiesa luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fatewe follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts.

They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome. Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the authors signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.