Jasmine Vijh, widowed in India at 17, flees to America. This is the story of her daring travels, her painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural metamorphosis and, eventually, the home she finds in Iowa where she accepts how inextricably her fate has become part of America's.

When Jasmine Vijh is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a future of quiet isolation in a small Indian village. But, voracious for life, she flees to America. Six years on she has become Jane Ripplemeyer, resident of Iowa, married to a middle-aged banker and adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Jasmine's odyssey through America, rippling with energy and daring, reflects Mukherjee's preoccupation with the fractured lives of exiles and immigrants caught up in a painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural metamorphosis. In this uncompromising novel that draws on all the strengths of the award-winning The Middleman and Other Stories and carries them to a new level of perception and intensity, Bharati Mukherjee has given us a heroine's 'greedy with wants and reckless with hope' - and leaves us breathless with surprise.