Deepti Gupta

WINNER OF THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE A playful, feminist, and utterly original epic set in contemporary northern India, about a family and the inimitable octogenarian matriarch at its heart. "A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you've got women and a border, a story can write itself . . ." Eighty-year-old Ma...

Veena, Mala and Nandini are three very different women with something in common. Out of love, each bears a secret that will haunt her life--and that of her daughter--because the risk of telling the truth is too great. But secrets have consequences. Particularly for Asha, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, who links them together. After her eighteenth birthday, Asha is devastated to learn that she was adopted as a baby. What's more, her birth...

Dia Mittal is an airline call center agent in Mumbai searching for an easier life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia's checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum--call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in...

A leader in the fields of animal ethics and neurology, Dr. Aysha Akhtar examines the rich human-animal connection and how interspecies empathy enriches our well-being. Deftly combining medicine, social history and personal experience, Our Symphony with Animals is the first book by a physician to show that humans and animals have a shared destiny-our well-being is deeply entwined. Dr. Akhtar reveals how empathy for animals is the next step in our species'...

"In 2016, Pakistan's first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn't be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian--and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats....

"Thoughtful and brilliant insights into the very nature of war--from the ancient Greeks to modern times--from the world's foremost expert historian. War--its imprint in our lives and our memories--is all around us, from the metaphors we use to the names on our maps. As books, movies, and television series show, we are drawn to the history and depiction of war. Yet we nevertheless like to think of war as an aberration, as the breakdown of the normal...

When you believe a better life waits for you beyond death, the perfect place to die is a difficult thing to find. Content warning: this story contains self-harm and disordered eating. "Ghost Bread" is one of 9 short horror stories in Nightfire's audio anthology. Come Join Us by the Fire S2: Originals is the second installment of Nightfire's audio-first horror anthology, featuring a wide collection of short stories from emerging voices in the horror...

Ron Jogani, a jeweler from Mumbai, is in Belgium to buy a consignment of loose diamonds worth over ten million Euros. Hours later he's dead in his hotel room in Brussels-murdered. The perpetrators are extremely tech-savvy and have defeated all the​ CCTV cameras in the hotel … but one concealed camera in the elevator has snapped one of the guys. When one of the stolen diamonds is sold in Mumbai, the Belgian Police reach out to their Indian counterparts. The...

She made her decision. Now she has to live with it. Durkhanai Miangul sealed her lover's fate when she sent him through a door where either a lady or a lion awaited him. But her decision was only the beginning of her troubles. Durkhanai worries that she might not be the queen her people need or deserve when conflict threatens her kingdom. Her presumed-dead father comes back with a vengeance and wishes she join him in his cause. But her family's...

The human drama captured in this memoir is nothing short of amazing-a young woman's struggle between the two worlds of her existence. Saved by her grandmother from being killed at birth for being a female, and abandoned by her mother at a young age, Shilpa faces the formidable constraints placed on her by her family and the village elders. The values with which she is being brought up in a school for poor children started by a philanthropist come...