Desirable Daughters

National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bharati Mukherjee presents here a portrait of a traditional Brahmin family on the brink of dissolution. Tara, the novel's narrator, divorced from the husband she wed in an arranged marriage and transplanted to San Francisco, teeters between the India that she left behind and the dizzying California she now calls home. Through evocative, elegant prose, Mukherjee keenly observes the tension created as Tara struggles to reconcile the ancient traditions of her past with the modern demands of her new life. Though separated by geography and by radically different lifestyles, Tara and her sisters - the "desirable daughters" of the book's title - remain close, and when danger befalls Tara, it is her sisters and her ex-husband to whom she turns for comfort and renewal and for help in resolving the mystery that threatens to destroy her and her family.