By Manish Chand, IANS 

Book: 'Unaccustomed Earth';

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri;

Publisher: Random House India;

Pages: 333

Price: Rs 450 

JHUMPA Lahiri has an uncanny gift for turning 'unaccustomed earth' into a familiar habitat of fiction.

A habitat where she consorts with upwardly mobile immigrant Bengalis enacting their exquisite little dramas of belonging and un-belonging, of losing and finding themselves all over again.

The eight stories in Lahiri's new book are based on the transformations intrinsic to the immigrant experience.

This is a genre she has refined since her debut Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Interpreter of Melodies' - the phenomenon of seemingly rooted people transplanted into the American soil.

The title story 'Unaccustomed Earth' links up to a passage in author Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel 'The Custom House', that suggests human nature may atrophy if people continue to toil in the same worn out soil.

Hawthorne's exhortation, 'strike your roots into unaccustomed earth,' could as well be an anthem for Lahiri's cast of upper middle class, expatriate Bengali suburbanites, venturing into foreign shores - read the Boston-New York corridor - to rebuild their homes and identities afresh.

Photograph: Book cover of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest book Unaccustomed Earth