Reading List

Authors Like Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize at thirty-two for her first book. Interpreter of Maladies (1999) is nine stories about Bengali families in New England and Calcutta, in which a marriage falls apart over a game played during a power cut and a tour guide realises what a passenger has just told him. The Namesake (2003) followed, then Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013), shortlisted for the Booker. And then she stopped writing in English. She had been learning Italian for years, moved to Rome, and in 2015 published In altre parole, a book about that decision, written in a language she did not yet command. Dove mi trovo (2018) is a novel about a woman walking through an unnamed Italian city; Lahiri translated it into English herself three years later as Whereabouts. Racconti romani followed in 2022, in English as Roman Stories. She now also translates Domenico Starnone, edited the Penguin anthology of Italian short stories, and is co-translating Ovid's Metamorphoses from Latin. Her own formulation for it: to be a writer-translator is to value both being and becoming. She directs the creative writing programme at Barnard. The ten below split between the two halves of that career.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Two languages · Pulitzer Prize 2000 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jhumpa Lahiri, the closest match for the early stories is William Trevor, the master of the quiet devastating one, with Colm Tóibín and Anita Desai nearby. If what draws you is a writer working in an adopted language, read Yiyun Li, and then Domenico Starnone and Natalia Ginzburg, the Italians she translates and champions. Rachel Cusk is the closest to Whereabouts. And Bharati Mukherjee is the argument against her: she rejected the whole melancholy immigrant register on principle.

Every book by Jhumpa Lahiri →

10 authors like Jhumpa Lahiri

01
The quiet story, perfected · Closest match

William Trevor

Irish · The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Love and Summer (2009), the collected stories

Trevor wrote around a hundred short stories over fifty years, mostly about Irish and English people whose lives turn on something small and irreversible: a letter not sent, a misunderstanding at a gate, a marriage entered into for want of an alternative. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and never won it. He died in 2016, and the collected stories run to well over a thousand pages.

The closest match for what Interpreter of Maladies does, and the writer Lahiri is most often measured against by people who read short stories seriously. Both work by restraint: the significant thing is said once, quietly, and the reader realises a paragraph later what has happened. Trevor is bleaker and has fifty years of practice; Lahiri gives you the texture of a household in a way he rarely bothers with. Start with the collected stories and read three.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Trevor →

02
The other writer in an adopted language

Yiyun Li

Chinese-American · A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), The Book of Goose (2022)

Li came to the United States to study immunology and began writing in English, a language she took up as an adult and has said she chose deliberately over Chinese. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; The Book of Goose, about two girls in postwar rural France and the book one of them is credited with writing, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Princeton and her prose is deliberately unornamented.

The nearest living parallel to the decision that reorganised Lahiri's career. Both are writers of great precision who chose to work in a language that was not their first, and both have said the choice was about distance rather than convenience — the acquired language keeps a certain sentimentality out. Li is the colder writer and the more formally daring. Read her stories after Unaccustomed Earth and the resemblance is obvious.

— Lisanne

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03
Leaving, and the cost of it

Colm Tóibín

Irish · The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009), Long Island (2024)

Brooklyn follows Eilis Lacey from a small town in Wexford to New York in the early 1950s, into a boarding house, a department store job and a marriage, and then back to Ireland for a visit that complicates everything; John Crowley filmed it in 2015 with Saoirse Ronan. Long Island returns to Eilis twenty years later. The Master is a novel about Henry James. Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize several times.

The same subject — a person who emigrates and finds that both places now have a claim — written with the same refusal to raise the volume. Brooklyn and The Namesake are almost companion novels, one Irish and one Bengali, both about a young person whose parents' expectations follow across an ocean. Tóibín is the more withholding writer; almost nothing is stated outright. Read Brooklyn.

— Lisanne

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04
The novel that is nearly all interior

Rachel Cusk

British · Outline (2014), Transit (2016), Parade (2024)

The Outline trilogy is narrated by a woman who barely speaks while other people tell her their lives at length and reveal themselves in the telling; her name is withheld for most of the first book. Cusk came to the form after two memoirs, on motherhood and on divorce, were attacked so widely that she has described being unable to write afterwards. Parade (2024) breaks the structure further.

The closest match to Whereabouts, which surprised readers who knew Lahiri only from the family novels: an unnamed woman, an unnamed city, forty-six short chapters, almost no plot and a great deal of noticing. Both writers arrived at the same solution — strip the narrator of biography and let observation carry the book — independently and at roughly the same time. Read Outline next.

— Lisanne

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05
The Italian she champions

Natalia Ginzburg

Italian · The Little Virtues (1962), Family Lexicon (1963)

Lessico famigliare reconstructs an anti-fascist Turin family almost entirely through their catchphrases — the things her father shouted at the table, the words only they used — and won the Strega Prize in 1963. Ginzburg insisted it be read as a novel. Her first husband died in a Rome prison in 1944 after being tortured by the German occupiers. She worked as an editor at Einaudi, translated Proust, and was elected to the Italian parliament in 1983.

One of the writers Lahiri's Italian turn led her to, and an obvious ancestor of her method. Ginzburg builds a family and a decade out of recorded speech and small objects, refuses to explain how anyone felt, and lets an entire political period arrive at the edges of a domestic scene. That is Unaccustomed Earth in Italian, forty years earlier. She is warmer than Lahiri and much funnier.

— Lisanne
06
The Italian she translates

Domenico Starnone

Italian · Ties (2014), Trick (2016), Trust (2019)

Starnone has written more than a dozen novels and won the Strega Prize in 2001 for Via Gemito. Ties opens with a wife's furious letters to the husband who has left her and then reveals, decades later, what the marriage actually became; Trick puts an elderly illustrator alone in a Naples flat with his four-year-old grandson. Lahiri has translated three of his books into English, and Ties was the first.

Reading Lahiri's translations is the closest you can get to watching her work. Starnone writes marriages and families with a cold precision she clearly recognised, and the English versions are hers — the rhythm, the word choices, the restraint are decisions she made. Start with Ties, which is short and vicious, and then read her afterword, which is about translation as much as about the book.

— Lisanne
07
Older than the genre · The Indian household

Anita Desai

Indian · Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984)

Clear Light of Day is set in a decaying Old Delhi house where two sisters, one who left and one who stayed, work through what was done and not done in the family around Partition. In Custody follows a provincial lecturer trying to interview a great Urdu poet and finding the man impossible. Desai has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Her daughter Kiran Desai won it in 2006.

The writer who established the Indian family novel in English as an interior form rather than a national epic, and a direct ancestor of what Lahiri does. Both write the house rather than the country: the meals, the silences, the sibling who resents having stayed. Desai is more atmospheric and less plotted. Read Clear Light of Day if the family material in The Lowland was the part that held you.

— Lisanne
08
The same migration, at higher volume

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian · Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Americanah (2013), Dream Count (2025)

Half of a Yellow Sun covers the Biafran war through five characters and won the Orange Prize. Americanah follows Ifemelu from Lagos to an American university, into a blog about race written by a non-American Black woman, and eventually back to Nigeria; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dream Count (2025) follows four women across two continents.

The other great contemporary novelist of moving between countries, and the tonal opposite. Lahiri writes what cannot be said at a dinner table; Adichie writes a character who says it, at length, in public, and is funny and combative about hair, accents and American racial categories. If you found the early Lahiri too restrained, this is the corrective that is still working the same material.

— Lisanne

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09
Bengal, across oceans

Amitav Ghosh

Indian · The Shadow Lines (1988), The Hungry Tide (2004), The Great Derangement (2016)

The Shadow Lines moves between Calcutta, Dhaka and London around the communal riots of 1964, and is about how a family's memory and a national border are made of the same unreliable material. The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans. He trained as a social anthropologist and also writes non-fiction on climate and empire, including the argument that the modern novel cannot take climate change seriously.

The Bengali material at national scale rather than domestic. Lahiri's families carry Calcutta with them into New England kitchens; Ghosh writes the Partition, the riots and the delta itself, and treats the border as the thing that made those families move in the first place. Read The Shadow Lines after The Lowland, which is her most historical and most political novel.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against her

Bharati Mukherjee

Indian-American · The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine (1989)

Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, spent years in Canada and then settled in the United States, and argued forcefully that she was an American writer rather than an Indian one in exile. The Middleman won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1988. Jasmine follows a young widow from a Punjabi village through illegal entry into Florida and on to Iowa, changing her name and her self at every stop. She died in 2017.

The direct rebuttal to the register Lahiri made famous, made a decade before Interpreter of Maladies. Mukherjee rejected expatriate melancholy on principle — the tasteful sadness, the parents' unspoken loss, the sense of a self left behind — and wrote immigration as violent, opportunistic reinvention instead. Her Jasmine does not mourn what she left; she sheds it. Read Jasmine and then ask which version of the story you believe.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Jhumpa Lahiri

If you loved the stories, read William Trevor.

The collected stories. Fifty years of lives turning on something very small.

If you loved The Namesake, read Colm Tóibín.

Brooklyn. The same emigration, in Wexford and New York, said even more quietly.

If you loved Whereabouts, read Rachel Cusk.

Outline. An unnamed narrator, other people's lives, and almost no plot.

If you want the Italian she translates, read Domenico Starnone.

Ties. A marriage, in Lahiri's own English, short and vicious.

If you want the argument against her, read Bharati Mukherjee.

Jasmine. Immigration as reinvention, with none of the melancholy.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jhumpa Lahiri

Who should I read if I love Jhumpa Lahiri?

William Trevor for the short stories, and Colm Tóibín and Anita Desai for the family novels of leaving and staying. If what interests you is a writer working in an acquired language, Yiyun Li is the nearest parallel, and Domenico Starnone and Natalia Ginzburg are the Italians she translates and champions. Rachel Cusk is the closest to Whereabouts. Amitav Ghosh writes the same Bengal at national scale, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the same migration at much higher volume, and Bharati Mukherjee is the writer who rejected the whole melancholy register on principle.

Which Jhumpa Lahiri book should I start with?

Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the Pulitzer-winning first collection, and specifically “A Temporary Matter” and the title story. If you would rather have a novel, The Namesake (2003) is the most loved and the easiest to enter. The Lowland (2013) is the most ambitious of the English books, taking in the Naxalite movement in 1960s Calcutta. Whereabouts (2021) is unlike all of them and is best read once you know what she usually does.

Why does Jhumpa Lahiri write in Italian?

She began learning it in her twenties, kept at it for two decades, moved to Rome in 2012 and eventually stopped reading and writing in English almost entirely for a period. Her explanation, set out in In Other Words, is that working in a language she does not fully command strips away fluency as a defence and forces a different kind of attention. She has since translated her own Italian novel into English, which she has written about as a strange doubling: the same book, made otherwise.

Is Jhumpa Lahiri writing a new book?

Nothing new has been announced as of September 2026. Her most recent fiction is Roman Stories (Racconti romani, 2022; English 2023, co-translated with Todd Portnowitz), and Translating Myself and Others (2022) collects her essays on translation. She is co-translating Ovid's Metamorphoses from Latin with Yelena Baraz for the Modern Library, which is a long undertaking, and she directs the creative writing programme at Barnard.

Should I read Whereabouts in English or Italian?

Either, and the fact that it is a real question is the point. Dove mi trovo was published in Italian in 2018 and Lahiri translated it herself in 2021, so the English is not a version of the book by someone else — it is the author making the same book again in another language, three years later and with different instincts. If you read Italian at all, reading a few pages of each side by side is the most interesting hour available in her whole body of work.

What is the criticism of Jhumpa Lahiri?

That the early work is too well behaved. The stories are impeccably made, the emotions are restrained, and the immigrant experience arrives as tasteful melancholy rather than as anger or comedy — which some readers find truthful and others find safe, particularly given how thoroughly the form was imitated afterwards. Bharati Mukherjee had made the argument in principle years earlier. The Italian books are, among other things, a comprehensive answer to it: she dismantled the instrument she was praised for.

Is The Namesake film worth watching?

Yes. Mira Nair's 2006 adaptation, with Irrfan Khan and Tabu as the parents and Kal Penn as Gogol, keeps the novel's two-generation structure and its refusal of big scenes, and Khan's performance is the reason to watch. It compresses the American sections considerably. Read the novel first: the effect of the book depends on accumulation over decades, which two hours cannot reproduce.

What does she translate?

Chiefly Domenico Starnone, whose novels Ties, Trick and Trust she brought into English, and her own Italian work. She edited The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019), translating several of the pieces herself, which is the fastest way to see what she values in Italian writing. She is currently co-translating Ovid's Metamorphoses. Her essays on all of this are in Translating Myself and Others.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“To be a writer-translator is to value both being and becoming.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others, 2022.

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