PRE-ORDER: Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq

Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize

A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India’s highest literary honors.

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 humor, 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 India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

REVIEWS

"Exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society, these vivid stories hold immense emotional and moral weight." —The International Booker Prize 2025 Judges

"Banu Mushtaq was one of the founding members of the Bandaya Sahitya Sanghatane, which means the Rebel Literary Movement. A favorite phrase of the movement was: ‘The dear friend whose heart beats for people’s pain.’ We see this compassion and love for the people, in particular Muslim women, that Mushtaq writes about in her stories. As a friend, she writes from amidst them, for them, through the struggles, details and complexity of their lives. Deepa Bhasthi's beautiful translation shares these stories with a wider readership." —Kavita Bhanot

"With a tender heart and a sharp eye for nuance, Banu Mushtaq pens stories with deep contextual understanding of patriarchal institutions and with sympathy to the modern realities of contemporary Muslim women." —Joshua Jones

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: And Other Stories
ISBN: 978-1916751163
Pages: 192