Interpreter of Maladies

This collection of nine stories follows Indian and Indian-American lives across Calcutta, New England, and the space between. The title piece puts a tour driver who interprets for a doctor into a day's outing with a Bengali-American family whose marriage is fraying. Other stories treat a couple after a stillbirth, a lonely housewife who learns to drive, a party where a partition memory returns, and marriages arranged or improvised after immigration. Food, language, and small domestic objects carry the strain of displacement. The book is a set of independent short fictions, not a novel and not a sociological survey.

Quarter-bound in spine title blocked blue cloth with blue textured paper sides printed with a colour image. Orange slipcase blocked in blue with images.