Almost no one is happy that Jhumpa Lahiri has written her latest book in Italian. Reviewers have blamed an abundance of clichés and trite sentences on Lahiri’s presumed infelicity with the new language. It’s true that the Pulitzer Prize winner is a meticulous craftsperson where her earlier, English books are concerned, and the lack of depth in some of the observations in this book is a disappointment.

The bigger concern, though, is the love for Italian that Lahiri professes in her book, which is actually a compendium of columns that, nevertheless, reveals a narrative arc. Critics are asking whether Lahiri will now abandon English altogether for the third language in her life. (Bengali, her mother tongue, was the first.)

In Other Words (In Altre Parole in the original), is certainly about languages, and the complex, scary, humbling feelings that accompany the act of learning, discovering and handling them. It is also a rivetting account of translation, of translating one's life – on the shapes our identity takes according to how we use our words.

It's a memoir, a love story with a language: “I realised there was a space inside me where it could be comfortable." For Lahiri, who was born to Bangla-speaking parents in the UK and has lived most of her adult life in the US, Italian is a language that comes after her family relationship with Bangla and a life lived in English. To immerse herself in the experience, she moved with her family to Rome, and that is where this book published in a dual-language form – English and Italian – has come from.

The book reveals a rare vulnerability as Lahiri admits to the deep sense of disconnectedness that the languages in her life have imposed on her.

Published in Italian in 2015. English edition, translated by Ann Goldstein, published in 2016.