Heart Lamp

Selected Stories

By: Deepa Bhasthi - translator, Banu Mushtaq

Narrated by: 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

outstanding outrageous

around the world poor people suffer and women bear the brunt of procreation and poverty...these stories must be understood more broadly and remedies such as affirmative action imposed

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.

Sadness , one human’s cruelty to another.

Why tell stories of such sadness and cruelty and meanness and manipulation and corruption? Human life is not valued. And, I hate reading about women’s subjugation to men. Are women not equal to men? Do they not deserve to live THEIR life?

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

I enjoyed the insight into the differen culture.

I enjoyed the stories and was interested in the characters. The names got a little confusing to keep up with, so I had to go back sometimes to check the relationship or position. I also didn’t know I would like short stories. I'm going to check out more short stories.
I recommended this book to my other bookclub.