Desirable daughters : a novel
(Book)

Originally published in 2002.

Publishers and dates vary.

Treated as a "blanket" record for the classic title. Other versions with criticism, illustrations, adaptations, etc. cataloged separately.

On a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, a 5-year-old girl is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when an ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee, visits this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Tara and her oldest sister live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara and her husband are estranged when the novel opens, but when a stranger claiming kinship shows up at the house that Tara shares in San Francisco with her son and her boyfriend, she reconsiders her assumptions about her entire family. In the course of the novel, a sister's secret and a murder are uncovered, and a near-fatal bombing occurs.