List $34.95

Written by Jhumpa Lahiri - Audio book performed by Sarita Choudhury - Unabridged Fiction - COMPACT DISCS - 10 hours

Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (September 2003)

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one of the most brilliant of her generation. 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.

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 marriage, 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 a 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.

About the Author: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri lives in New York with her husband and son.

About the Performer: Sarita Choudhury has appeared in numerous films such as Mississippi Masala, Kama Sutra, It Runs in the Family, Wild West, The House of the Spirits, and A Perfect Murder. Television credits include Deadline, 100 Centre Street, and Homicide.