About this item
Reese Witherspoons Book Club PickA lively, sexy, and thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and womens lives at all ages - a spicy and alluring mix of Together Tea and Calendar Girls.Every woman has a secret life . . .Nikki lives in cosmopolitan West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, shes spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community of her childhood, preferring a more independent (that is, Western) life. When her fathers death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a "creative writing" course at the community center in the beating heart of Londons close-knit Punjabi community.Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected - and exciting - kind.As more women are drawn to the class, Nikki warns her students to keep their work secret from the Brotherhood, a group of highly conservative young men who have appointed themselves the communitys "moral police." But when the widows gossip offers shocking insights into the death of a young wife - a modern woman like Nikki - and some of the class erotica is shared among friends, it sparks a scandal that threatens them all.
About the Author
Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of four novels, including Singapore Literature Prize finalist "Sugarbread," and the international bestseller "Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows," which was a selection of Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine book club. Her debut novel "Inheritance" won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist award. Jaswal's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan.com, Harper's Bazaar India and Salon.com, among other publications. Her latest novel "The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters" was released to critical acclaim in 2019, and is now available in paperback.
