Jasmine - 2nd Edition by Bharati Mukherjee (Paperback)

About the Book

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. "Rich...one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." -- The New York Times Book Review

Book Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF TIME' S "30 BOOKS TO READ BEFORE YOU'RE 30"

"Mukherjee gives us the gift of being allowed to see ourselves in all our inconsistencies . . . To build our hearts so they might always reflect, like Jasmine, what it means to carry what is fraught and scared and dismissive and hopeful and wild inside us, and choose love." --Mira Jacob, from the new introduction

When Jasmine was first published the New York Times called it "one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. Following one woman through her numerous identities -- from Jyoti in a small village in Punjab, to Jasmine in Jalandhar, to Jase in Manhattan, to Jane in Iowa -- Mukherjee gives us an iconic character whose journey through shifting landscapes necessitates her shifting selves. What she encounters on this path, from India to America and from girlhood to womanhood, shows the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the journeys of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow.

With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the "Matriarch of Indian-American literature." (Literary Hub)

Review Quotes

"Her prose fiction is masterful, giving us a perspective on a singular life imagined with impeccable care and judgment." --Joyce Carol Oates

"A fable, a kind of impressionistic prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today; Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded." --New York Times