Darjeeling: A Novel

Forbidden love, sibling rivalry, and the immigrant experience in New York City: these are just some of the themes packed into Bharti Kirchner's Darjeeling. As the novel opens, 40-year-old Aloka stares out her apartment window in midtown Manhattan, contemplating the end of her marriage to Pranab--a man she met in her homeland of India. The lost marriage, like the lost country, fills her with nostalgia and angry confusion. Soon the reader learns the source of Aloka's bitterness: her sister's affair with her husband, a scandal that propelled her to this distant city with its "gray-brown bustle." Chapters alternate between the two sisters' lives, and Kirchner renders the passions of both women with empathy and grace. At the heart of Darjeeling is the question of the broken bond: will the sisters be able to cross the emotional and geographic distances that separate them? --Ellen Williams