The history lessons are interesting, and the science plays to Lahiri's great strength as an observer of the physical world. The tempo is stately (Lahiri's art has always tended more towards steady accretion than juxtapositional speed), but there is enough going on to keep the reader's attention. Shifting between Subhash's studious absorption in the estuaries and wildlife of Rhode Island, and Udayan's spiritedly engaged life back in India, the first part of the book seems to be building towards a kind of grand, pincer-movement confrontation with the double tragedy of modern life: political injustice and environmental degradation. From speeches and leaflets he progresses to knives and bombs, and is forced into hiding after his involvement in the killing of a policeman. Udayan is his fiery opposite: a dynamic idealist whose social conscience propels him into the Naxalite movement, the Maoist insurgency that arose out of the brutal oppression of peasants in the Naxalbari district of Darjeeling.

Drawn to nature, he becomes a scientist, moving to America to pursue his oceanographic studies in Rhode Island.

Subhash, the older, is the more passive and conventional. Two Bengali brothers, close but unalike, forge very different paths for themselves as they grow up in Calcutta during the 1950s and 60s. The Lowland, included this week on the Man Booker shortlist, certainly starts well. Her first collection brought emotional power and moral complexity back to a form that had drifted deep into an arid, academic minimalism, and contained pieces that were as formally inventive in their own rich way as any of Raymond Carver's more austere miracles.

Some of her stories, especially, seem to me among the best written by any living author.

The lowland lahiri