An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

Overview

“What an astonishing collection! Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Stranger Things Happen

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250118721
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	664,285
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

An Unrestored Woman
The Merchant's Mistress
The Imperial Police
Unleashed
Blindfold
The Lost Ribbon
The Opposite of Sex
Such a Mighty River
The Road to Mirpur Khas
The Memsahib
Kavitha and Mustafa
Curfew

Editorial Reviews

Rich and intelligent, An Unrestored Woman crisscrosses generations of different faiths affected by the largest migration in human history. It shines a necessary light through the dark turmoil of that period in North India and Pakistan, illuminating the crevices of her characters’ inner lives.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“[Rao’s] prose is a stunning set of contradictions. Short, simple sentences give an electrifying punch to the gut, making sections where Rao rises to the heights of lyricism all the more powerful…Through her characters, Rao delves into greater psychological complexity…Rao navigates the realities of race, marriage, and identity in a way that feels intensely genuine. This story and the rest of the collection establish Rao as a writer with not only uncommon range, but a unique and powerful voice.”
—The Kansas City Star

“Without a doubt, Shobha Rao’s debut, An Unrestored Woman, is the best short fiction I’ve read this year. These dozen stories are savage and empathetic, brutal and lyrical, mournful and celebratory…Rao’s stories reverberate beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations.”
—Bloom.com

“What an astonishing collection! Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Stranger Things Happen

“Shobha Rao writes, with equal power, of the turmoil and tragedy of Great Events, but also the small, intimate lives of those doomed to live through them. In her vivid descriptions of other times and places, people rise above or fall beneath the wheel of history, but all have stories to tell and the wonderful Rao to tell them. This transporting debut will linger in your mind long past the last page.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times best-selling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

“Shobha Rao is a spellbinding storyteller. With An Unrestored Woman, she lifts a handful of individuals from the wreckage of Partition and illuminates their inner lives with daring and empathy. I tore through these stories, as fearful for these characters as if I'd known them my whole life.”
—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage

“A remarkable collection that explores the reverberations of Partition through generations, from a mapmaker's gamble to a grandfather who cannot speak of what he escaped as a boy. Shobha Rao has given us clear-eyed stories of intense ruptures and unexpected connections, searing violence and genuine love.”
—Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter

“Stunning and relentless…The stories span more than a century, and Rao never idealizes the time of colonial rule prior to Partition or neglects the later difficulty of being an immigrant in the United States and Britain but instead focuses on how the choices the characters make reverberate for years and across generations. Rao’s language is particularly good at reflecting the interior lives of her characters [who] are meticulously developed within each story.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“Rao’s raw and breathtaking short story collection is set against this epic canvas, yet her character studies are intimate. Here are soulful human beings struggling with ways of retaining their essential humanity against overwhelming odds even as they face the starkest of choices between life and death for themselves and their loved ones…Exquisite turns of phrase and editing with a fine-edged scalpel only add to an outstanding and memorable debut.”
—Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

What an astonishing collection! Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.

author of GET IN TROUBLE and STRANGER THINGS HAPPE Kelly Link

Shobha Rao writes, with equal power, of the turmoil and tragedy of Great Events, but also the small, intimate lives of those doomed to live through them. In her vivid descriptions of other times and places, people rise above or fall beneath the wheel of history, but all have stories to tell and the wonderful Rao to tell them. This transporting debut will linger in your mind long past the last page.

Karen Joy Fowler

10/15/2015
Winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, Rao offers 12 paired stories that take place during India and Pakistan's calamitous partition yet focus on dangerous personal cracks and shifts in the characters' own lives.

Library Journal

★ 2016-01-10
Rao's debut story collection illuminates how the division of India and Pakistan into two countries violently disrupted the lives of the region's citizens for years. The characters in these 12 stories are connected by the effects of Partition in August 1947, as the Radcliffe Line divides the former British colony into two countries and forces a mass migration of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. With a sophisticated sense of pacing and patience, the stories build on one another by focusing on how the actions of those in power affect vulnerable women and children on both sides of the divide. The stories are paired, an interesting variation on linked stories, as there are six sets in which a character introduced in the first story also appears in the next. In "An Unrestored Woman," a 13-year-old widow, Neela, faces the continuation of her loveless marriage after her husband, erroneously reported dead, comes back to claim her from a refugee camp. In the next story, "The Merchant's Mistress," Neela's friend from the camp, Renu, becomes the servant and lover to both a diamond merchant and his wife, until an opportunity presents itself for her to escape. Other featured characters include a gay British officer facing the loss of his career after an uprising during Partition kills the Sikh officer he was attracted to; a Hindu cartographer who moves the proposed boundaries of the Radcliffe Line in the hope of personal gain; and a Hindu woman and a young Muslim boy who work to escape from a train under attack in Pakistan. The stories span more than a century, and Rao never idealizes the time of colonial rule prior to Partition or neglects the later difficulty of being an immigrant in the United States and Britain but instead focuses on how the choices the characters make reverberate for years and across generations. Rao's language is particularly good at reflecting the interior lives of her characters. Her sentences are beautiful but never lapse into sentimentality: "The water was cold, silken, and when she dipped her head under it, it passed over her scalp with the thickness and the strength of a hand"; "that's what she had thought while traveling on the train: that to journey through such emptiness was to invite it inside." Though the characters are meticulously developed within each story, the collection as a whole examines how little power a person might have over his or her own destiny when confronted with war and international disputes. Stunning and relentless.

Kirkus Reviews