Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Books in Aspen recommends stories from India, a mystery involving a fractured family and a tale of first love.
Heart Lamp
By Banu Mushtaq and Translated by Deepa BashthiAnd Other Stories$19.95April 2025Purchase
From the publisher: In the 12 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.
From Katrina Nelson, bookstore and café lead: I read once that some great books are meant to comfort, some great books are meant confront: “Heart Lamp” is certainly the latter, with a sharp sense of humor and a narration that weaves through intense family dramas and violent systems with the candor of Indian story-telling (often in third-person, occasionally through first person).
Each of the 12 stories is about different women at different stages of their life — children, young brides, aged-wives, elderly women — and the dynamic of their days in South India, treated as property, pulsing with longing for lives unlived, and hysterical (expressed in different ways) about the unspoken injustice of their limitations. I never found the material too heavy to consume; both the author and the translator had me either laughing, appalled, or learning something brand new at every sentence.
Lost Lambs
By Madeline CashFarrar, Straus and Giroux$28January 2026Purchase
From the publisher: The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud’s open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his 20s nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone — or something — is monitoring the town’s citizens.
Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy — one that may just bring them closer together.
Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s “Lost Lambs” is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. Cash has crafted a family saga for the 21st century, all held together with crazy glue.
From Clare Pearson, book buyer: This is a book for readers who loved children’s books in which the children were a lot sharper and more capable than all the adults. The plot veers into extreme and absurd territory, while offering plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and clever wordplay. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a humorous respite.
Lie With Me
By Philippe Besson, translated by Molly RingwaldScribner$16.99April 2020Purchase
From the publisher: Philippe chances upon a young man outside a hotel in Bordeaux who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Thomas is the son of a farmer; Philippe the son of a school principal. At school, they don’t acknowledge each other. But they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.
Despite the intensity of their attraction, from the beginning Thomas knows how it will end: “Because you will leave and we will stay,” he says. Philippe becomes a writer and travels the world, though as this novel shows, he never lets go of the relationship that shaped him, and every story he’s ever told.
From Philip Psaledakis, bookseller: “Lie With Me” is a short, devastating novel about the tragic consequences of leaving socially unaccepted love unpursued. A bestseller in France, the novel captures the aches and pains of first love and dwells on the absurd reality of chance encounters — encounters that remind you of the unchanging past from which you emerge. Read this book to recall youth and your first conscious dealings with beauty.
THIS WEEK’S BOOK RECS COME FROM:
Explore Booksellers
221 E. Main St., Aspen
(970) 925-5336
explorebooksellers.com
Twitter Instagram FacebookAs part of The Colorado Sun’s literature section — SunLit — we’re featuring staff picks from book stores across the state. Read more.
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