Heart Lamp
Selected Stories
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mushtaq makes her English-language debut with this virtuosic collection, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, about the public and private lives of women in southern India's Islamic communities. In "A Taste of Heaven," a wryly humorous tale of three children trying to comfort their rapidly declining great-aunt, the children tell her she's already in heaven and that the Pepsi she's drinking is aab-e-kausar, the water of a river in Paradise. Elsewhere, Mushtaq lands gut-wrenching social critiques, as in the title story, about a mother who resolves to self-immolate after her family refuses to support her choice to leave her unfaithful husband. In "The Shroud," a wealthy housewife agrees to bring her cleaning woman a funeral shroud from Saudi Arabia, forgets to do it, and becomes inconsolable with guilt when the woman dies. In "Black Cobras," a woman left destitute after her husband leaves her learns her rights under Sharia from the educated woman she does menial labor for, then tries to petition the local mosque for help. The stories are united by a keen eye for the interplay between their characters' social circumstances and inner lives, as religious authority and economic class exert their influence. It's an excellent introduction to an author of rare talent.
