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An Unrestored Woman

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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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    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 15, 2016

      Presenting her dozen stories in six interlinked pairs, Rao uses the savage 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as her narrative center, with reverberations moving outward beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations. A 13-year-old's would-be widowhood spent in a refugee camp is the best part of her difficult life in the titular tale, while her fellow refugee experiences international adventures in "The Merchant's Mistress." The British officer in "The Imperial Police" returns decades later as a New York doorman in "Unleashed." A prostitute in "Blindfold" reveals her tragic matricidal sacrifice in "The Lost Ribbon." A massacre survivor in "Kavitha and Mustafa" has his mourning granddaughter visiting Italy with her British husband in "Curfew." In narrating Rao's debut, Neela Vaswani moves effortlessly among myriad voices, from Indian villagers to British colonizers to contemporary women living in Manhattan high-rises. VERDICT Absolutely impeccable, Woman joins other exquisite first multicultural collections including Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Violet Kupersmith's The Frangipani Hotel, and Krys Lee's Drifting House.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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