What You Call Winter (2007)

Nalini Jones' polished but conventional linked stories in What You Call Winter explore terrain staked out by Jhumpa Lahiri: the world of middle-class Indians, at home, abroad, and caught somewhere between. In the luminous ''In the Garden,'' Marian grows up in a loving extended family in India; in ''Half the Story,'' set several decades later, she's in Ohio, pining for India, and inadvertently triggering her own daughter's far tawdrier loss of innocence. B