Uprising

I devoured this ferocious feminist fireball of a novel from a Granta Best of Young British Novelist, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and author of the Bengal trilogy. A rebellion ignites among a community of sex workers on an island, as told through the voices of their children, who witness their enslavement and degradation. Inspired by a real state-licensed brothel in Bangladesh, it captures the powerlessness of these women, who are violently detained by the sinister Amma – and then, tainted, shunned by their families – until the arrival of Kusum, a resolute woman from the city.