About the author
Banu Mushtaq is an Indian Kannada-language writer, lawyer, and activist from Karnataka. Her fiction has followed the lives of women within family, religious, and social structures, and Heart Lamp brought that work to English readers through Deepa Bhasthi's translation.
Heart Lamp gathers twelve stories written by Banu Mushtaq across more than three decades. Their households and neighborhoods in Karnataka are full of argument, gossip, work, prayer, children, and women calculating what can be said safely and what must be said anyway.
Where to start
Start with Heart Lamp: Selected Stories. Twelve stories follow women in Muslim communities of southern India as they negotiate marriage, faith, money, family authority, and the language used to contain them.
