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An acclaimed novel by the author of The Mistress of Spices, and Before We Go to the Goddess. Jhumpa Lahiri praises: "One Amazing Thing collapses the walls dividing characters and cultures; what endures is a chorus of voices in one single room."
Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of the passport and visa office within an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers attended and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an urgent gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by the question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of adulterous affair.
When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts with their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. Any office begins to flood. Then, at an instant when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much to allow them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they haven't told anyone before. As their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold contrary to the urgency of the life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, writer of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story as of yet. One Amazing Thing is a separate creation about survival--and about the reasons to survive.
