Heart Lamp

Selected Stories

De: Deepa Bhasthi - translator, Banu Mushtaq

Narrado por: Deepti Gupta, Vikas Adam

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize

Winner of a PEN Translates Award

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.

©2025 Banu Mushtaq. Translation © 2025 by Deepa Bhasthi (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

a peek into women 's hearts, minds, families and lives in their own language. original and authentic

it is authentic and real, written in people's language. it reveals a woman's world

Stories of everyday life in the Muslim community in Karnataka a southern Indian state.

Loved all the short stories. The simplicity of their daily lives the nuances within, the complex relationships and both male and female viewpoints were very well drawn. The prose is lyrical and the stories flow beautifully.

How social customs can dehumanize and crush.

Groups can be placed in impossible circumstances in which the only hope is to depend on the generosity of an indifferent or even hostile overlord. Individual efforts to comply will not change the circumstances.

Disappointing

My least favourite narration ever! Over-exaggerated accents and most unpleasant character voices. The poor voice acting ruined the joy of listening to this book!

I didn’t get very far

I agree with the other reviewer. When I listened to the preview, the narration was fine, but as I continued to listen it was overly emotional and I ended up returning this title.