Her stories

We review novels we loved by four women writers on subjects as varied as a cross-country romance, a racy whodunit and a historical fiction inspired by the personal tragedy of a literary genius

Kintsugi
By Anukrti Upadhyay

Broken people and broken lives fit together like a complex puzzle of pure gold. This is what we felt after reading Upadhyay’s stellar fiction Kintsugi (HarperCollins India). Named after the ancient Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold, the novel revolves around extraordinary women and their simmering stories of passion and love. It opens with the story of Haruko, who travels to Jaipur from New York, to learn the craft of jewellery making from the sunars—it’s not a skill they want to readily part with, especially to a woman. There’s Leela, who becomes her apprentice of sorts, slowly learning to become her own person as a karigar. Somewhere, in Japan, the rebellious Meena, whose life is intertwined with Haruko’s, has abandoned home and a prospective groom for Yuri, the woman she loves and grieves for. Upadhyay takes great pains to explore the tiny details, both of craft and human relationships, and her soft and lyrical prose makes this a journey that will stay with you, long after you’ve read it.
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Price: Rs 499

Hamnet
By Maggie O’Farrell

One of our first reads this year, O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Hachette India), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction last year, is the fictional retelling of Anne alias Agnes Hathaway, the wife of English writer William Shakespeare. Set in 1580s’ England, during the Black Plague, the book investigates the inspiration behind the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet, which is said to have emerged out of a personal tragedy, the death of his son, Hamnet, to the epidemic. While this has just been a feverish speculation for years, O’Farrell’s novel makes it very real. 
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Price: Rs 699

Small Pleasures
By Clare Chambers

Chambers’ novel has our heart. Reading it over two weekends, we were completely invested in the story of journalist Jean Swinney, 39, whose monotonous life, in London of the late 1950s, comes undone when she is put on a rather unusual reporting assignment. Gretchen Tillbury, who comes across an easily missable article in the paper in which Jean works on parthenogenesis—reproduction from an ovum without fertilization—writes in with a sensational claim: her daughter is a product of virgin birth. Jean, a single and unmarried woman, whose dreams of love and freedom are drowned by the burden of caregiving for an ageing mother, takes on the challenge, even if reluctantly. She hopes to uncover the truth, but at some point, she herself gets caught in a drama unfolding within the Tillbury family. Small Pleasures (Hachette India) is a potboiler, laced with a soft love story and a historic event that will completely change the lives of its characters.  
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Price: Rs 899

The Hottest Summer in Years
By Anuradha Kumar

Kumar travels back in time, with her period novel, The Hottest Summer in Years (Yoda Press). Set in post-Independent India, the book tells the story of Hans Gerder, a man with a fractured past living  in a small town in central India. It’s the early 1960s, and the country is still healing from the scars of Partition. Gerder finds love in young Lipsa, the daughter of his mistress Tilo, the wife of Raja Sahib. This innocent love is cut short by a most gruesome crime, involving perhaps, the Raja. The love story, spliced with a racy whodunit, is sincere at its best.  
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Price: Rs 599

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