On a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, a 5-year-old girl is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when an ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee, visits this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Tara and her oldest sister live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara and her husband are estranged when the novel opens, but when...

After the assassination of her husband, Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of her past

In her luminous new novel, Bharati Mukherjee creates a vivid, complex tale about the dislocation and transformation that arise in the face of a meeting of cultures: the terrain she has so brilliantly made her own in her acclaimed novels and stories. Here, in The Holder of the World, we witness an unlikely and intriguing meeting of two worlds, the Puritan American and the Mughal Indian. In a startling commingling of history and imagination, Mukherjee...