My two all-time favorite authors are Jhumpa Lahiri and Khaled Hosseini. Whenever these two authors release new books I drop whatever I’m doing and dive right in. (Which reminds me, Hosseini’s newest novel, And the Mountains Echoed, is released tomorrow, so if you don’t hear from me the rest of the week…)

I cannot more highly recommend these two authors. If you’re interested in checking out Jhumpa Lahairi’s work for less, the Kindle version of The Namesake is now on sale for $2.99.

Here’s the synopsis:

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

Of course, The Namesake was also made into a movie a few years ago, but the book is much better and worth reading.