Death by a Thousand Cuts

Stories

By: Shashi Bhat

Narrated by: Ellora Patnaik

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • One of Apple Canada’s Best Ebooks of 2024 • CBC Books' Top Pick for Most Anticipated Canadian Fiction for Spring 2024

A breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman, from the Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth.

What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.

A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.

With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.

©2024 Shashi Bhat (P)2024 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

“Bhat creates characters through careful analysis overlaid with irony and wit. She sets out to uncover and expose the dynamic intricacies that beset contemporary women, in particular. . . . A formidable presence in the expanding worlds of Canadian literature, Shashi Bhat explores the tensions between traditional South Asian families and the feminist impulses of a younger generation. While her stories are often humorous, they are also wise accounts of women trapped in conventions that militate against them.”—David Staines, Literary Review of Canada

“These stories open a view onto a world that will likely be very familiar to many women, whether they are South Asian or not, and there’s no doubt that South Asian women raised in Canada will be able to see elements of their own experiences. . . . Death by a Thousand Cuts is a grimly fitting title.”—British Columbia Review

"The wry female characters in Death By a Thousand Cuts are so genuine and evocative, it is impossible not to empathize with them. All of Bhat's stories possess a sharp-eyed restraint, and they will astonish and move you with their darkly glittering moments of hilarity and depth. Within these pages you will find poignancy, humour, and unflinching insight on the precarity and absurdity that is contemporary female life. Bhat is an undeniably talented storyteller and an indelible voice in modern fiction. I loved this collection!!!"—Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality