Home – Manju Kapur

Tender and funny, Manju Kapur’s third novel is an engrossing story of family life, across three generations of Delhi shopkeepers. When their traditional business – selling saris – is increasingly sidelined by the new fashion for jeans and stitched salwar kameez, the Banwari Lal family must adapt. But, instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop, and the daughters are confined to the family home. As envy and suspicion grip parents and children alike, the need for escape – whether through illicit love or in the making of pickles or the search for education – becomes ever stronger. Very human and hugely engaging, “Home” is a masterful novel of the acts of kindness, compromise, and secrecy, that lie at the heart of every family.

Difficult Daughters – Manju Kapur

Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a woman torn between family duty, the desire for education, and illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor–a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.