Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $3.44

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $3.44

  When Jasmine Vijh is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a future of quiet isolation in a small Indian village. But, voracious for life, she flees to America. Six years on she has become Jane Ripplemeyer, resident of Iowa, married to a middle-aged banker and adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's odyssey through America, rippling with energy and daring, reflects Mukherjee's preoccupation with the fractured lives of exiles and immigrants caught up in a painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural metamorphosis. In this uncompromising novel that draws on all the strengths of the award-winning The Middleman and Other Stories and carries them to a new level of perception and intensity, Bharati Mukherjee has given us a heroine's 'greedy with wants and reckless with hope' - and leaves us breathless with surprise.

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $17.33

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