Jasmine

One of the best-loved novels from a writer of richness and significance, Jasmine has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as “artful and arresting . . . breathtaking . . . [Mukherjee] marks with unsparing brilliance the symptoms of a new Third World.” When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine’s desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine’s metamorphosis, with its sudden upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her–our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati M