East is East and West is West, but the twain meet with a crash in Gurgaon - the epicentre of the outsourcing revolution in India, where thousands of the country's youth live with their bodyclocks set to US time zones and their cultural antennae pointing west. Into this maelstrom walk three very different young women:

Ayra, the golden girl: with a high profile job and a fancy title, everything seems to be going her way, until she finds herself at the helm of what could be the worst disaster of her career,

Shivaa, the perfect housewife turned desperate career woman who has to fight life, marriage and her irrational new boss to make sense of her existence, and

Sara, the shy college graduate turned spunky office-goer, who is willing to risk it all rather than be pushed into an early marriage by her anxious parents.

Debut author, Shruti Saxena weaves a very modern fairytale of professional jealousy and ruthless manipulation, heroic victories and egoistic cowardice, unfulfilled dreams and desires and raw, unadulterated ambition as seen though the eyes of these three extraordinary woman and the men who love them.

Who is the 'Good Indian Girl?' What does she look like? How does she dress? Is she real -- or is she a myth? In this funny, wicked, touching, irreverent, poignant collection of stories, Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra lift the veil (or sari pallu) on the lives and loves of girls who have been born or raised in the subcontinent. The niceties have to be observed, but the urge to subvert is often overwhelming. As they shimmy down drainpipes at midnight, or steal covert glances at the boys across the street, the real life incidents from which these stories are drawn will ring a bell with any woman who has negotiated the minefield of family love and romantic longing and desire that lies between childhood and womanhood.

This landmark collection on colonial history is now available in a brand new edition as part of the Zubaan Classics series to celebrate Zubaan's 10th anniversary.

This collection of essays stands at an unarticulated conjuncture within the feminist movement and women's studies that have emerged in India since the 1970s. The anthology attempts to explore the inter-relation of patriarchies with political economy, law, religion and culture and to suggest a different history of 'reform' movements, and of class and gender relations. The book seeks to uncover the dialectical relation of feminism and patriarchy both in the policies of the colonial State and the politics of anticolonial movements. The writers in this volume include scholars from various disciplines.

Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid taught literature at Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University. Together they have edited a collection of essays entitled Women and Culture and have carried out extensive research on widow immolation in Rajasthan.

This collection of mind-expanding stories is now available in a brand new paperback edition as part of the Zubaan Classics series to celebrate Zubaan's 10th anniversary.

Already a name in the world of science fiction and fantasy writing, Vandana Singh presents her first collection of stories, bringing this unique imagination to a wider audience. In the title story, a woman tells her husband of her curious discovery: that she is inhabited by small alien creatures. In another, a young girl returning home through the streets of Delhi comes across a mysterious tetrahedron: is it a spaceship? Or a secret weapon? Each story in this fabulous collection opens up new vistas -- from outer space to the inner world -- and takes the reader on an incredible journey to both

"A most promising and original young writer" -- Ursula K. LeGuin, author of The Earthsea Trilogy

"I'm looking forward to the collection despite the fact that I haven't actually read that much of Singh's work, or perhaps because of that fact, because everything I've read has impressed me -- the past and future visions in 'Delhi', the intensity of 'Thirst', the feeling of escape at the end of 'The Tetrahedron'..." -- Niall Harrison, Vector (British Science Fiction Association)

"...attracts all the inadequate adjectives reviewers pull out when rendered nearly speechless: beautiful, evocative, mysterious, brilliant, stunning..." -- www.sfsite.com

"...the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world, ... she writes with such a beguiling touch of the strange." -- Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard

"Singh says that speculative fiction has a 'unique, revolutionary potential'. If so, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet is as enjoyable as a revolutionary text you're likely to find." -- Jess McCabe, The F Word.

A revolutionary take on the classic dystopian science fiction novel, Clone inaugurates a new kind of writing in India. Priya Sarukkai Chabria weaves the tale of a fourteenth-generation clone in twenty-fourth-century India who struggles against imposed amnesia and sexual taboos in a species-depleted world. With resonant and allusive prose, Chabria takes us along as the clone hesitantly navigates through a world rendered unfamiliar by her expanding consciousness. This slow transformation is mirrored in the way both she and her world appear to the reader. The necessary questions Chabria raises revolve around a shared humanity, the necessity of plurality of expression, the wonder of love, and the splendour of difference.

Clone’s adventurous forays into vastly different times, spaces, and consciousness—animal, human, and post-human—build a poetic story about compassion and memory in the midst of all that is grotesque.

Note: A different version of this book was previously published under the title Generation 14.

"Eloquent"
— Sudipta Dutta, The Financial Times

"A poetic imagination"
— Tim Parks, translator and author

"Ambitious and inventive"
— George Szirtes, translator and poet

"Lyrically written"
— Rashmi Vasudeva, Deccan Herald

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is a writer, poet and translator. She has written several books, including Dialogues and Other Poems, Not Springtime Yet, and Generation 14. She is also the co-author / co-translator of Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess, published by Zubaan in 2016.

In Suki, fabulist Suniti Namjoshi weaves a delightful tapestry from threads of longing, loss, memory, metaphor, and contemplation. The whole picture is a stunning evocation of the love and friendship shared between S and her Super Cat, Suki, a lilac Burmese. Suki suggests that she could be a goddess, and S her high priestess. S declines, but as they discuss the merits of vegetarianism, or the meaning of happiness, or morality, or just daily life, it soon becomes clear that the bond between them is a deep and complex one. The days of Suki's life are figured as leaves, which fall vividly but irrevocably into time's stream and are recollected with a wild tenderness by the grieving S, who learns through the disciplines of meditation how to lose what is most loved.

This beautiful narrative, both memoir and elegy, offers solace and celebration to everyone who has felt the trust that passes between a person and a beloved creature.

Published in March of 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel Umrao Jaan Ada created a sensation when it came out, with its candid account of the life of Umrao Jaan, a semi-fictional, possibly real, Lucknow courtesan. Subsequent translations and films based on the book have further extended the fame of both the book and Umrao, the character.

What is less known, however, is that a month after he wrote Umrao Jaan Ada, Ruswa penned a short text, a novella entitled Junun-e-Intezar (The Madness of Waiting, April 1899) in which Umrao avenges herself on her creator, Ruswa, by narrating the story of his life.

Blurring the lines between truth and fiction, narrator and character, this clever narrative strategy gives the courtesan a speaking voice. While Umrao Jaan Ada, continues to evoke interest, this paratext has been completely forgotten. Here, translators and editors Krupa Shandilya and Taimoor Shahid, one a scholar from India and the other from Pakistan, attempt to redress this with their translation of Ruswa's novella and their critical introduction which rethinks Umrao Jaan Ada and the Urdu literary milieu of late nineteenth-century Lucknow.

This book contains both the Urdu text (in facsimile) and its translation for the bilingual reader.

In this new collection by well- known author Nighat Gandhi, the private worlds of women open themselves up to the reader. Inside their homes are women trapped in a state of continuous limbo, waiting for change; young girls struggling for the ‘purity’ that religion demands of them; new mothers who wonder at the absence of desire. Outside, the seasons change, trees shed their leaves, the sky becomes overcast, sounds float in to them and they wonder about the meaning of life. Each of the stories bring questions for the reader, their nuanced telling and their unsparing truthfulness leave readers with a sense of discomfort as they confront their own demons. Love, longing, loss, aging, survival, hope and self-invention—in other words, life— are what these stories are about.

“A clear-eyed view of life’s innate contradictions”
—Mita Ghose, The Hindu

“Allahabad may just have found her Chekov”
— Irwin Allan Sealy

“Touches of poetry”
— Anjana Basu, Outlook

NIGHAT GANDHI is a mental health counsellor, a mother, a South Asian, queer-feminist, Vipassana meditator, and a student of Taṣawwuf (Sufism). She wrote many of these stories armed with cups of Leo coffee, riddled with self-doubt, and bothered by back pain as a result of spending hours hunched over her laptop, in the comforting company of her two dearest companions, Dodi and Heidu, who snoozed on the floor and kept sleepful watch over her. Waiting is her fourth book.

"A wise and wonderful insight into modern motherhood"" - Farah Khan.

What do you call a feminist who is a mother? A femimom? A mominist? Or just a confused woman balancing the many roles in her life: working professional, mother, wife, daughter...

Meet Tara Mistri, stay-at-home mom and frustrated architect: a baker of biscuits and maker of bricks.
Inspired by and in total awe of the Salk Institute in California, Tara hankers to replicate its clean lines and perfect symmetry in her own life. But with two small children to look after, her set squares and scales are used for scraping plasticine out of the carpet and her career looks like it may remain on the backburner forever. Then, one day, she is offered a job and finds herself on the horns of a dilemma.

Goaded by her own personal demon — a nagging Yakshi who just won’t let her alone — Tara’s struggle to balance life and love, work and playdoh will have readers nodding in recognition, wincing in sympathy and laughing along with her.

Set in mid-nineteenth century Assam when the forces of tradition were being challenged by new concepts of modernity, Swarnalata is the story of three women from very different social backgrounds, each caught in the whirlpool of change, each trying to chart her own course in life, heroically, silently. As the intertwined lives of Swarnalata, Tora and Lakhi unfold, the reader is taken on a fascinating journey into the social milieu of the times where issues like women's education and widow remarriage held centre stage. The plight of indentured labour, peasant resistance against colonial exploitation, the reformist initiatives of the Brahmo Samaj and the proselytizing efforts of the Christian missionaries are themes that run through the narrative. Considered one of the finest historical novels in Assamese, where real historical personages - such as Rabindranath Tagore - are presented side by side with fictional characters, Swarnalata provides a wonderful blend of history and fiction. Swarnalata was first published in Asomiya in 1991. It was awarded the Ishan Puraskar by the Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad in 1995 and translated into Bangla and Hindi under the 'Adaan-Pradaan' programme of the National Book Trust. The Asomiya original is now in its fouth edition and has received wide critical acclaim in the last 15 years.

This story of extraordinary courage and survival is now available in a brand new paperback edition as part of the Zubaan Classics series to celebrate Zubaan's 10th anniversary.

This is the story of Baby Halder, a young woman working as a domestic in a home in Delhi. Hurriedly married off at the age of twelve, a mother by the time she was fourteen, Baby writes movingly and evocatively of her life as a young girl, and later as a young woman. The long absences of her father, the hardships faced by her mother, and her decision to walk out of her marriage, leaving Baby and her sister to manage the household, were the realities that shaped Baby's early life.When marriage came, Baby, still a child, yearned to play and study, but was burdened with the responsibility of being wife and mother while facing considerable violence from her husband. Escape finally came many years later, by which time the still young Baby was a mother of three, and she fled to the city in the hope of finding a job. Working in Delhi as a domestic help, Baby was lucky enough to come across an employer who encouraged her to read -- which she did voraciously -- and then to write. The story of Baby's life is a lesson in courage and survival.

Since it was first published in Hindi, this book has become a bestseller, receiving accolades from some of the best-known writers and critics in India and elsewhere. It has also been translated into other Indian languages.

Baby Halder is a writer and a domestic worker who lives and works in a home near Delhi. She is now working on her second book.

Urvashi Butalia is a publisher and writer whose work includes the award-winning oral history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.

Twelve short stories about everyday life and the political realities of Assam.

“My stories,” says the author, “are a lot about darkness but they are also about the small sparks of light that occasionally dispel the demons in our souls.”

In this collection, a doctor’s comfortable existence in a tea estate is rudely shattered by violent conflict, a daughter reflects on the failure of her parents’ inter-religious marriage, and children discover how shockingly little time it takes to go from joking to being thrown headlong into bloody carnage.

Sharp and eloquent, Uddipana Goswami’s stories bring into harsh focus how interwoven political violence is with everyday life.

All Mrinalini Singh wants, she has. A loving husband, a competent cook, the vague hope of a book deal one day. But when her old roommate Jahanara accuses her of being selfish, Mrinalini is forced to practise altruism on the nearest available target: her maid’s toddler. All this caring doesn’t come easy, though; and it hardly helps that her husband Siddhartha has quit his lucrative job and acquired parental ambitions. Or that Brajeshwar Jha, her upstairs tenant and literary rival, has not only published his book before Mrinalini, but also lampooned her and Siddhartha in it. Close to Home is a wry look at the small compromises, manipulations and sustained self-delusion of young men and women possessed of good fortune... and only looking for good lives.

A Dalit, a Buddhist and a feminist: Urmila Pawar's self-definition as all three identities informs her stories about women who are brave in the face of caste oppression, strong in the face of family pressures, defiant when at the receiving end of insult, and determined when guarding their interests and those of their sisters. Using the classic short story form with its surprise endings to great effect, Pawar brings to life strong and clever women who drive the reader to laughter, anger, tears or despair. Her harsh, sometimes vulgar and hard- hitting language subverts another stereotype - that of the soft-spoken woman writer. Pawar's protagonists may not always be Dalit, and the mood not always one of anger, but caste is never far from the context and informs the subtext of each story. As critic Eleanor Zelliot notes, there is 'tucked in every story, a note about a Buddhist vihara or Dr Ambedkar.... All her stories come from the Dalit world, revealing the great variety of Dalit life now.'

"The book gives a wide range of material on one of the important struggles of feminism in India." -- Gail Omvedt, The Hindu