Heart Lamp: Selected Stories | WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025, Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp brings together stories of women and girls living within Muslim communities in southern India, originally written in Kannada and now available in English translation. Mushtaq spent years working as both a journalist and a lawyer, advocating for women's rights and speaking out against caste and religious injustice, and that lived experience gives these stories a specificity and moral weight that you feel on every page. Short, precise observations sit alongside richly drawn family dramas. The prose is witty in one breath, raw in the next. What holds it all together is an extraordinary ear for the spoken word, the kind that turns ordinary domestic conflict into something quietly devastating. The characters are the real achievement here: fierce grandmothers, mischievous children, pompous religious figures, hapless husbands, and, at the centre of everything, mothers bearing the quiet cost of their own inner lives. It's a cast drawn with sharp humour and genuine compassion. Mushtaq's work has attracted criticism from conservative circles, yet it has also earned India's most celebrated literary honours, a tension that tells you something about how necessary this writing is. Heart Lamp is a collection with real staying power, the sort of book that lingers long after the final page.
- Author: Dr Banu Mushtaq
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0143464471
- Pages: 224 pages