"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. In Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, The Namesake, and her short story collections Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies, she is adept at depicting the particular unhappinesses at the core of the families she crafts. So too in her intricate novel The Lowland, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and Man Booker prize: tracing how brotherly bonds become broken by violent politics, it is suffused with sadness.