Jasmine

&quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear ... and foretold my widowhood and exile," relates Jyoti, fifth cursed daughter in a family of nine. Though she can't escape fate, Jyoti reinvents herself time and again. She leaves her dusty Punjabi village to marry as Jasmine; travels rough, hidden airways and waters to America to reemerge as Jase, an illegal "day mummy" in hip Manhattan; and lands beached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenage Vietnamese refugee and "wife" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) makes each world exotic, her lyrical prose broken only by the violence Jasmine almost casually recounts and survives.

• Swimming with Sharks: Inside the World of the Bankers
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
• No Longer at Ease
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
• American Born Chinese
• Wide Sargasso Sea
• Shortcomings