Desirable Daughters

In 1879, in a village in East Bengal, a five-year-old girl is married to a tree after her bridegroom dies of snakebite. Her story opens the novel, and her descendant Tara narrates it from San Francisco more than a century later. Tara is the youngest of three Calcutta sisters raised in a sheltered Brahmin household. She is now divorced, raising her teenage son Rabi and making a looser American life. Then a young man appears claiming to be the son of her eldest sister, Padma, and the family's careful silences begin to crack.

Mukherjee, a prizewinning novelist, writes about sisterhood, migration and the old rules that follow people across oceans with real warmth and a keen eye. This is for readers who like family novels that are also about history, and who enjoy a secret slowly coming to light.