Heart Lamp: Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
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.
Customer Reviews
Heartlamp Mentions in Our Blog
As 2025 draws to a close, it's time for our roundup of some of the year's most celebrated books. Here is a selection of the winners of literature's most distinguished awards and honors.
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
