Heart Lamp
Selected Stories
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Heart Lamp
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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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Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 15
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 15
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Story4 out of 5 stars 15
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
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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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Overall4 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4 out of 5 stars 33
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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3 out of 5 stars
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Must Need All Volumes
- By Chris Reich on 05-26-25
By: Solvej Balle
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Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 11
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent story & narration
- By Rachel on 06-28-25
By: Susan Choi
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 6
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Story5 out of 5 stars 6
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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5 out of 5 stars
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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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When the Cranes Fly South
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Ridzén, Alice Menzies - translator
- Narrated by: Ifan Huw Dafydd
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Bo is running out of time. Yet time is one of the few things he’s got left. These days, his quiet existence is broken up only by daily visits from his home care team. Fortunately, he still has his beloved elkhound Sixten to keep him company … though now his son, with whom Bo has had a rocky relationship, insists upon taking the dog away, claiming that Bo has grown too old to properly care for him. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotion, leading Bo to take stock of his life, his relationships, and the imperfect way he’s expressed his love over the years.
By: Lisa Ridzén, and others
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The South
- A Novel
- By: Tash Aw
- Narrated by: Windson Liong
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1
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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Hot Milk
- By: Deborah Levy
- Narrated by: Romola Garai
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 149
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 136
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 136
Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant - their very last chance - in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Protagonist's journey of self
- By Saleh on 02-11-17
By: Deborah Levy
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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.
By: Solvej Balle
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Eurotrash
- A Novel
- By: Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Kemp
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Story4 out of 5 stars 17
From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.
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4 out of 5 stars
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I loved the interaction between mother and son
- By BBWrighter on 03-05-25
By: Christian Kracht, and others
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 82
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story5 out of 5 stars 77
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This is music
- By Jason Mccormick on 03-15-25
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3 out of 5 stars 118
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 106
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Story3 out of 5 stars 106
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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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3 out of 5 stars
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Potting more than a slice of life
- By Susan on 06-07-25
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We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4 out of 5 stars 81
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
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Endling
- A Novel
- By: Maria Reva
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Saskia Maarleveld, Maria Reva
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall2.5 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 4
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Story2 out of 5 stars 4
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
By: Maria Reva
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Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 720
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 628
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 627
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch