description: Jhumpa Lahiri's poignant first novel builds on the themes of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. In THE NAMESAKE, the Ganguli family emigrates from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs at the end of the 1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage. An MIT engineering student, Ashoke is progressive and ready to enter American culture, while his tradition-bound wife, Ashima, desperately misses her Indian home and resists the new world. When their first child, a boy, is born, they give him the pet name of Gogol, after the Russian writer, whose writings Ashoke believes were instrumental in saving his life. This tale of three generations sensitively explores the profound conflicts between cultures and generations, the child's search for cultural identity, and the power of acceptance.
language: English
title: The Namesake
titlecomplete: The Namesake
characters: Gogol/Nikhil Ganguli, Ashima Ganguli, Sonia/Sonali Ganguli, Moushumi Mazoomdar, Maxine, Ashoke Ganguli
genres: Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels, Adult Fiction, Literature, Indian Literature, India, Adult, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 264822
places: Cambridge, Massachusetts
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Longlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: books on Tape