topics: |  fiction | usa | india | diaspora

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
shocking 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 Mukherjee has created
a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QO_aEa_BdasC