PRESS RELEASE

From the Pulitzer Prize winner,
a surprising, powerful and eloquent non-fiction debut

IN OTHER WORDS

By JHUMPA LAHIRI

About the Book:

In Other Words is at heart a love story – of a writer’s passion for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery eluded her. So in 2012, she decided to move to Rome where she began to read, and to write – initially in her journal – solely in Italian.

In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. It is a book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Nabokov.

A startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.

About the Author:

Jhumpa Lahiri is the award-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland.

For further information please write to: Shruti Katoch Dhadwal skatoch@penguinrandomhouse.in ; 9717422412

PRESS RELEASE

From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies comes the biggest non-fiction book of the year.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘The Gene: An Intimate History’is a brilliant and definitive account of the gene and he combines approachable and scintillating science with a deft human touch.

Penguin presents
the monumental
The Gene
by
Siddhartha Mukherjee

About the Book:

Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856, where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganises our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. Above all, this is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds— from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea being brought to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history—the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to ‘read’ and ‘write’ the human genome —unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity—and a vision of both humanity’s past and future..

About the Author:

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction and the Guardian First Book Award.
Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem cells, and his team is internationally recognised for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in blood cancers.

He has published work in Nature, Cell, Neuron, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and several other magazines and journals. He lives with his family in New York City

For more details please write to vtanwar@penguinrandomhouse.in or call Varun at +91-9910201553