Published by Guanda Editore, the book will be presented for the first time in London at the Italian Cultural Institute London Tuesday 6 November at 7pm, with author Sandro Veronesi. Yes, it is clear she may have some regrets but there is peace about the way she decided to live her life and that for me was so affirming. It's astonishing that Lahiri published her novel in its original Italian in 2015 — years before the pandemic and its lockdowns and forced distancing — presenting her own translation this year.

The writing was flat, the descriptions fairly dull and the narrator's observations fell between the clichéd and the pedestrian. The quiet story has a dreamlike quality and shifts between shadow and light, absence and presence, stillness and movement, till the narrator makes a momentous decision.

In almost every chapter I found thoughts or gestures that could have been my own although the particulars of my life couldn’t have been further from those of that woman.

But whereas the plot is slender, the story is as fat and ripe and juicy as a late summer Italian plum. The pared down style is incredibly refreshing; for this introvert it's like entering a conversation without all the small talk bullshit that is my personal nails down a chalkboard.If I had a mild disappointment with the book it is that I had hoped the process of writing in a third language (the author’s mother tongue was Bengali) and self-translating into English – would mean that the author would bring a new perspective to English – a new way of assembling the language to explore and express ideas – and I did not really sense that (in fact in some ways the opposite - a perhaps deliberate downplay of English).

I don't know - this just feels underwhelming to me, a sort of generic version of contemporary 'literary women's writing' that never engaged or connected with me - instantly forgettable, in my case, I'm afraid. She translated the work into English, and during this time she also began translating Italian-language books by other authors. She has also moved back to the US, coming out a little, if not wholly, out of her self-imposed linguistic exile. The titles of these chapters in fact refer to the place—not always a ‘physical’ one such as in the case of the recurring ‘Tra sé e sé’ chapters (an expression that for the life of me I cannot translate in English)—she is in or thinking of.Other than for her bilingual book In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri announced that this time she would self-translate her first novel written in Italian into English. Sgomento ed esuberanza , radicamento ed estraneità : i temi di Jhumpa Lahiri in questo libro raggiungono un vertice.