MICHELE NORRIS, Host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.</s>W: "Miss New India."] Our reviewer Alan Cheuse says it offers an image of India both classic and contemporary.</s>ALAN CHEUSE: A village girl goes to the big city, throwing off the old ways and discovering her new identity. We've seen that plot at work here in our own fiction - I'm thinking of Dreiser's classic novel "Sister Carrie," which stripped away all pretence about the values of the new industrial city, as opposed to the old pastoral life of pre-Civil War America.</s>W: All of her call center friends work hard to sound American. Novelist Mukherjee doesn't have to do that. She's made a thoroughly American novel about her former nation that proves with serious dramatic verve and passion that going home again may be difficult for any of us.</s>MICHELE NORRIS, Host: "Miss New India" is the new book by Bharati Mukherjee. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Novelist Bharati Mukherjee offers a view of modern India in her new novel Miss New India.