Synopsis This selection contains some of the most fascinating contemporary Malayalam stories by women. A struggling single mother listens to her little girl’s urgent and original projects to bring them riches. The arctic landscapes of her childhood reading shift strangely when a woman decides to visit them for herself. Another story describes an ordinary afternoon where nothing really happens-except that dreamscapes resurface with an undertow of remembered pain. Stories possess a fine gained sense of place-claustrophobic tharavads, forest sounds, the songs of fishermen. Sexual violence is explored in all its complexity-male fears, a girl’s pleasure in her body, recurring encounters with casual abuse, with fiction that does violence to female experience.