Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025, *Heart Lamp* by *Banu Mushtaq* exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in Kannada, 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 that is at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving, and excoriating, it is 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.