Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
What an astonishing collection Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.
Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Stranger Things Happen
In her mesmerizing debut, Shobha Rao recounts the untold human costs of one of the largest migrations in history.
1947: the Indian subcontinent is partitioned into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. And with one decree, countless lives are changed forever.
An Unrestored Woman explores the fault lines in this mass displacement of humanity: a new mother is trapped on the wrong side of the border; a soldier finds the love of his life but is powerless to act on it; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage. Caught in a world of shifting borders, Rao s characters have reached their tipping points.
In paired stories that hail from India and Pakistan to the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the violent uprooting of families, the price they pay over generations, and the uncanny relevance these stories have in our world today.
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Shobha Rao on PowellsBooks.Blog
Tucked into a corner of South Dakota, 60 miles east of Rapid City and just north of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, are the Badlands — over 240,000 acres of layered rock, canyons, and grasslands. It is the rock that I most remember, each one rising out of the earth like a cathedral, all towering spires and pinnacles and buttes...
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