BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of seven novels (most recently Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride), two collections of short stories (Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories), and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction (Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy). She has also written numerous essays on immigration and American culture. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989.