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An Unrestored Woman

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An Unrestored Woman

By: Shobha Rao
Narrated by: Neela Vaswani
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About this listen

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.

Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories

Critic reviews

“In narrating Rao’s debut, Neela Vaswani moves effortlessly among myriad voices...Absolutely impeccable <i>Woman</i> joins other exquisite multicultural collections including Daniyal Mueenuddin’s <i>In Other Rooms</i>, <i>Other Wonders</i>, Violet Kupersmith’s <i>The Frangipani Hotel</i>, and Krys Lee’s <i>Drifting House</i>.”--Library Journal, Starred Review
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It took me a while to realise that these were individual stories sometimes woven together, sometimes not. Transporting and vivid from the closeness of partition to more recent times.

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