
Heart Lamp
Selected Stories
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Narrated by:
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Deepti Gupta
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Vikas Adam
About this listen
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.
©2025 Banu Mushtaq. Translation © 2025 by Deepa Bhasthi (P)2025 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
By: Tash Aw
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Monstrilio
- By: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal, Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
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Not exactly what I expected….
- By kisa on 10-06-23
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Theft
- A Novel
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Ashley Zhangazha
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
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Potting more than a slice of life
- By Susan on 06-07-25
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The Book of Records
- By: Madeleine Thien
- Narrated by: Athena Karkanis, Richard Lam, Madeleine Thien, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.
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The language is both brilliant and poetic
- By Robert M. Gordon, Ph.D. on 06-04-25
By: Madeleine Thien
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On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
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Must Need All Volumes
- By Chris Reich on 05-26-25
By: Solvej Balle
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Court of Nightmares
- A Courts and Kings Standalone
- By: K.A. Knight
- Narrated by: Tor Thom, Stella Hunter
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As a vampyr who was born to fulfill a prophecy, my life was planned before I was created. I obeyed every rule, and I became the perfect vampyr, but one night changed everything. Rejected by the man who was destined for me, who was supposed to love me forever, I do the only thing I can. I flee into the night, nursing my broken heart. Being a rejected mate corrupts the soul, however, and in this game of Courts and Kings, nobody wins. Nobody except the monsters in the shadows.
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If you value your time, and your brain cells, don’t even start this. The book is bad, the audio somehow makes it so much worse
- By Kayla Darling on 02-16-25
By: K.A. Knight
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Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
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Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
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Bliss Montage
- Stories
- By: Ling Ma
- Narrated by: Katharine Chin
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.
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Audiobook is defective
- By ᵔᴥᵔ on 09-22-22
By: Ling Ma
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On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
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Story loses momentum in Book II
- By elebras on 07-02-25
By: Solvej Balle
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Solenoid
- By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
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Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
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Perfection
- By: Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Hughes -translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 3 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored.
By: Vincenzo Latronico, and others
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Confessions of a Grammar Queen
- A Novel
- By: Eliza Knight
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Bernadette Swift, a young copyeditor at Lenox & Park Publishing, is determined to become the first female CEO in the publishing industry. But first she needs to take the next step up that ladder with a promotion that her boorish and sexist boss wants to thwart. Seeking a base of support, Bernadette joins a feminist women's book club at the New York Public Library, and soon, she's inspiring her fellow members to challenge the male gatekeepers and decades of ingrained sexism in their workplaces and pursue their personal and professional dreams.
By: Eliza Knight
Disappointing
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