The 10 Best Jhumpa Lahiri Books, Ranked (Where to Start)

Five standalone stories, then a linked trio at the close that follows Hema and Kaushik from a childhood in Massachusetts into an adulthood neither of them planned. The standalone pieces use the usual Lahiri furniture: a widowed father who has quietly started travelling, a brother whose drinking nobody names out loud, a marriage that has become a housing arrangement. What is different here is length. She gives each story enough room to change its mind, so the endings stop clicking shut the way the early ones do. Reading it feels like sitting through a long family lunch where somebody finally says the thing.

Nine short stories set between Calcutta, Boston and the awkward space in between. A young couple confess things to each other during scheduled power cuts. A tour guide at a temple decides a bored tourist's attention is an invitation. An old woman sweeps a Calcutta stairwell and tells anyone who listens about the life she says she lost. Lahiri was in her early thirties when this came out and the control is almost irritating: every story lands exactly where she wants it, not a sentence spare. That neatness is both the pleasure and, later, the thing she spends twenty years escaping.

Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli move from Calcutta to Massachusetts, have a son, and in the confusion of an American hospital give him a pet name that was only ever meant to be temporary. Gogol grows up hating it, changes it, dates his way through a life his parents cannot follow, and understands where the name came from far too late. The novel is slower than the stories and its pleasures accumulate: rooms, meals, phone calls to India, the specific loneliness of parents who have nobody left to be young with. Mira Nair filmed it in 2006 with Irrfan Khan and Tabu.

Subhash and Udayan grow up beside a low flooded field in Tollygunge, close enough in age to be mistaken for each other. Udayan joins the Naxalite movement of the late sixties. Subhash leaves for a doctorate in Rhode Island. What follows is a marriage made out of duty, a daughter raised on a withheld fact, and forty years of people failing to say one sentence to each other. It is her coldest English book and her most political, and the Rhode Island half is deliberately drained of colour. Some readers find that airless. I find it the most honest decision in the novel.

Forty odd short chapters, each named for a place: on the street, at the trattoria, in the piazza, at the beach in winter. A woman in her mid forties, unmarried, a teacher, moves through an Italian city Lahiri never names, thinking about her dead father, her mother's disapproval, a married friend she should not want. Nothing accumulates the way it does in a normal novel. What builds instead is a mood, the very particular solitude of a person who has arranged her life exactly as she likes it and is no longer sure that was wise. She wrote it in Italian and translated it into English herself.

Rome here is not the postcard version. It is bus routes, rented flats, park benches, holiday houses that belong to somebody else's family. Several of these stories follow immigrants and long-settled foreigners who are still asked, politely, where they are really from, and Lahiri writes that particular humiliation with a coldness her English fiction never had. She wrote the book in Italian and brought it into English with Todd Portnowitz. It is harsher than anything in Unaccustomed Earth and much less interested in making you comfortable. A few pieces run barely three pages and land like a slap.

Lahiri moved to Rome in 2012, stopped reading in English, and began keeping a notebook in Italian. This book collects the result: short, deliberately plain chapters about vocabulary, humiliation, and the exhaustion of being fluent at nothing. Two short stories sit inside it as well. The original editions print Italian and English on facing pages, and Ann Goldstein did the English, because Lahiri did not yet trust herself to translate her own Italian. That detail tells you more about the book than any summary could. It is the log of a very accomplished person choosing to be a beginner where everyone can see.

Starnone's short novel opens with letters from a wife whose husband has left her for a younger woman, then jumps decades to find the two of them old, back together, and packing for a holiday. What happened in between arrives out of order and from the wrong angles, which is the whole method. Lahiri translated it from Italian into English, and if you have read her own Italian work you can hear exactly how much she took from him: the flat sentences, the domestic cruelty, the refusal to editorialise. It runs to under a hundred and twenty pages and wastes none of them.

Ten essays, written mostly in English, about translating Starnone, translating herself, reading Ovid, and the odd position of a writer who now works between two languages and belongs completely to neither. The best of them takes apart what happens when she translates her own Italian novel into her first language, which turns out to be less like translating and more like arguing with an earlier version of yourself. It gets academic in places and she does not apologise for that. The thinking is first rate, and this is the only book here where she explains herself directly.

Seventy odd pages, first delivered as a talk in Florence, about the jacket as a garment the book is forced to wear. Lahiri writes about growing up in clothes chosen by other people, about school uniforms, and about the covers that made her books look like something she had not written. Her complaint is specific and familiar to any Indian reader: a sari, a mango, a hennaed hand, applied to a book about a couple in Massachusetts. It is charming, a little slight, and finished comfortably in one sitting.