Published in September of 1989, Bharati Mukherjee's third novel, Jasmine, tells the story of its eponymous protagonist's journey from the small village of Hasnapur, India to Jalandhar, to Florida, to New York, and eventually to Iowa, inhabiting a different persona for every stop along the way. Called by the New York Times upon its publication "one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American," Jasmine is concerned with identity and the immigrant experience in the post-Vietnam United States.
The novel grew from one of Mukherjee's short stories by the same name from her collection, The Middlemen and Other Stories, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel itself was named a New York Times notable book of the year and one of Time's "30 books to read before you're 30." Jasmine is among the novels that established Mukherjee as a pioneer of first-generation immigrant narratives and renders unique national mythologies of the United States and post-partition India of the 1980s.
