Mukherjee, Bharati

Beigh Masters, tracking a legendary diamond in the mid-twentieth century, comes across a record of the travels of her ancestor Hannah Easton, an American woman who flaunted Puritan society to become the white lover of a Hindu raja, and is drawn into the story of that distant life.

Tara marries the perfect Indian man her parents select, then divorces him and moves to San Francisco, where she breaks away from her traditional Brahmin family and finally begins to lead her own life.

At seventeen, Jasmine is a widow in a small village in India where she was born. Just a few years later, she is Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Nineteen-year-old Anjali Bose must face the challenges of betrayal, violence, and corruption after fleeing her country home and an arranged marriage to take up residence in a decaying mansion in Bangladore with her friend, an ex-patriate American teacher.

After her San Francisco home is bombed, Calcutta native Tara Chatterjee sets out to find her roots, tracing the story of her great-great-aunt, Tara Lata, who was married to a tree in her Indian village at age five.