The View From Above.

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

Jhumpa Lahiri's powerful new collection reveals a writer at the top of her form.

J humpa Lahiri was flying home from a book tour when the inspiration for the title story of Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf) struck. "I was 30,000 feet in the air, looking out the little window at the clouds," says the Pulitzer Prize--winning author, whose enormous eyes, the color of a slightly oxidized penny, give the impression of taking in the larger view. "Suddenly I had entered the mind of a character: a man going to visit his daughter and grandson after his wife's death."

It's a fittingly lofty point of origin for these peripatetic, sweeping stories--Lahiri's best yet--which move from Boston to Bombay and back again to evoke intricate topologies of emotion and characters who often feel more at home abroad. As in her previous work--the extraordinary debut story collection The Interpreter of Maladies and her heartfelt novel The Namesake (which was made into a film by Mira Nair)--the dislocations between Indian parents and their American-born children come under scrutiny, but now those children are adults having children, like Lahiri herself, the mother of Octavio, five, and Noor, three. "It's the first book I've written since becoming a parent, with the full consciousness of what it means to bring a life into the world and be responsible for that life. I can see both ends of the spectrum now."

Parents and children, husbands and wives--the enduring mystery of modern relating continues to fuel Lahiri in tales, some written over the course of a decade, that possess the gravitational pull of short novels. From the tradition-minded mother whose shattering passion for an avuncular friend goes unnoticed, to the widower who wishes he could warn ...