Uma, the plain spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions-unlike her ambitious younger sister, who has made a "good" marriage and managed to escape. Meanwhile their brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir, is studying in America, living in a Massachusetts suburb with the Patton family-where he finds himself bewildered by the culture that surrounds him.

Interweaves the stories of a baby girl in India, the American doctor who adopted her, and the Indian mother who gave her up in favor of a son, as two families--one in India, the other in the United States--are changed by the child that connects them.

"An absorbing family saga set amid the commotion of the last forty years of Indian history, The Way Things Were opens with the death of Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, a Sanskritist who has not set foot in India for two decades. Moving back and forth across three sections, between today's Delhi and the 1970s, '80s, and '90s in turn, the novel tells the story of a family held at the mercy of the times"--

"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and...

"Hurricane Harvey is about to hit Houston. Meanwhile, single mom Jia Shah is already having a rough week: her twelve-year-old son, Ishaan, has just been suspended from school for getting in a fight. Still reeling from the fallout of her divorce¿́¿their move to Houston, her family¿́¿s disapproval, the struggle to make ends meet on her own¿́¿now Jia is worried about Ishaan¿́¿s future, too. Will her solo parenting be enough? Doesn¿́¿t...

"A beautiful, powerful new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spies about three generations of mothers and daughters who must discover their greatest source of strength in one another--a masterful, brilliant tale of a family both united and torn apart by ambition and love. The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means...

Seventeen-year-old Unni has done something terrible. The only clue to his actions lies in a comic strip he has drawn, which has fallen into the hands of his father Ousep - a nocturnal anarchist with a wife who is fantasizing about his early death. Ousep begins investigating the extraordinary life of his son, but as he circles closer and closer to the truth, he unravels a secret that shakes his family to the core. Set in Madras in the 1990s, where...

For readers of Akhil Sharma, Mohsin Hamid, and Teju Cole, a haunting novel about an upwardly mobile family splintered by success in rapidly changing India. "It's true what they say--it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us." In this masterful novel by the acclaimed Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, a close-knit family is delivered from near-destitution to sudden wealth after the narrator's uncle founds a successful spice company....

"The films directed by the great Satyajit Ray in the last ten years of his life have a unique dignity and drama. Three of them are collected here: the fervent Rabindranath Tagore adaptation The Home and the World; the vital An Enemy of the People, based on the Henrik Ibsen play; and the filmmaker's final work, the poignant and philosophical family story The Stranger. They are complex, political, and humane depictions of worlds both corrupt and indescribably...