The Unknown Errors of Our Lives: Stories
Chitra Banerjee DivakaruniThe Unknown Errors Of Our Lives is Divakaruni’s second book of stories. In this collection, featuring tales set in India and America, Divakaruni illuminates the transformations of personal landscapes, real and imagined, brought about by the choices men and women make at every stage of their lives. The stories include “Love Of A Good Man,” a tale of a happily married Indian woman who must confront her past when her long-estranged father begs to meet his only grandson; “Mrs. Dutta Writes A Letter,” (selected for Best American Short Stories, 1999), where a widow living in her son’s Calfornia home discovers that her old world ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law; “The Blooming Season For Cacti,” where two women, uprooted from their native land by violence and deception, find unexpected solace in each other; and the title story, where an artist faced with her fiance’s past a week before her wedding must make an important decision. This book is published as The Lives of Strangers in the U.K. and as Bengalische Sterne in Germany.