The immigrant experience is always fertile ground for fiction, and Jhumpa Lahiri — born in London to Bengali parents and raised in Rhode Island — has built her literary career exploring this territory as it relates to characters of Indian origin in America, with all the attendant questions of identity, loyalty, memory and reinvention. Though she has produced only two collections of stories and, now, two novels, her reputation is firmly established as one of the leading fiction writers of her generation. Her debut collection, "The Interpreter of Maladies," won her the Pulitzer prize, a PEN/Hemingway award and the New Yorker prize for Best First Book. Her second novel, "The Lowland," has already been longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize.

THE LOWLAND, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Knopf, 2013, 340 pp., $27.95 (hardcover)

"The Lowland" is a sweeping, ambitious story that examines in intimate detail the intersection of the political and the personal, encompassing nearly 50 years of Indian and American history through the lives of one family. The novel ripples out from the beginnings of the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal in 1967. Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, are attracted by the radical communist movement while at university in Calcutta. But Subhash, the more cautious and sensible of the two, quickly perceives the danger involved and withdraws, leaving to study in the U.S.