Synopses & Reviews
National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Bharati Mukherjee has long been known not only for her elegant, evocative prose but also for her characters influenced by ancient customs and traditions but also very much rooted in modern times. In The Tree Bride, the narrator, Tara Chatterjee (whom readers will remember from Desirable Daughters), picks up the story of an East Bengali ancestor. According to legend, at the age of five Tara Lata married a tree and eventually emerged as a nationalist freedom fighter. In piecing together her ancestor's transformation from a docile Bengali Brahmin girl-child into an impassioned organizer of resistance against the British Raj, the contemporary narrator discovers and lays claim to unacknowledged elements in her American identity. Although the story of the Tree Bride is central, the drama surrounding the narrator, a divorced woman trying to get back with her husband, moves the novel back and forth through time and across continents.
Review
"The Tree Bride occasionally recalls the work of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges...when we arrive at the tree bride's life story, we drink it down with all the pride and curiosity of this book's lost but found heroine." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"Mukherjee is a master at creating magical, mysterious stories." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Mukherjee is a virtuoso." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Mukherjee is a potent writer, and her contrasted and conflicting worlds and times seductively draw us in." Kirkus Review
About the Author
Bharati MukheRjee is the author of seven novels, two non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories, including The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.