New Releases by Shauna Singh Baldwin

Introducing an eloquent, sensual new Canadian voice that rings out in a first novel that is exquisitely rich and stunningly original. Roop is a sixteen-year-old village girl in the Punjab region of undivided India in 1937 whose family is respectable but poor -- her father is deep in debt and her mother is dead. Innocent and lovely, yet afraid she may not marry well, she is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him any children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than expected. Roop's tale draws the reader immediately into her world, making the exotic familiar and the family's story startlingly universal, but What the Body Remembers is also very much Satya's story. She is mortified and angry when Sardarji takes Roop for a wife, a woman whose low status Satya takes as an affront to her position, and she adopts desperate measures to maintain her place in society and in her husband's heart. Yet it is also Sardarji's story, as the India he knows and understands -- the temples, cities, villages and countryside, all so vividly evoked -- begins to change. The escalating tensions in his personal life reflect those between Hindu and Muslim that lead to the cleaving of India and trap the Sikhs in a horrifying middle ground. Deeply imbued with the languages, customs and layered history of colonial India, What the Body Remembers is an absolute triumph of storytelling. Never before has a novel of love and partition been told from the point of view of the Sikh minority, never before through Sikh women's eyes. This is a novel to read, treasure and admire that, like its two compelling heroines, resists all efforts to be put aside.

And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection. Or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet: ALDEN NOWLAN's "A Boy's Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, "The Wanton Troopers," written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988. The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" from DOUGLAS GLOVER's 1991 GG-nominated story collection, "A Guide to Animal Behaviour." Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY's unforgettable Christmas story "The Three Marys," adapted from her award-winning debut novel, "Strange Heaven," published in 1993. Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN's glittering story "Simran" from her 1996 debut collection, "English Lessons and Other Stories." KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER's haunting "What Had Become of Us," from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, "Way Up." The extraordinary "Knife Party" from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.

The Selector of Souls begins with a scene that is terrifying, harrowing and yet strangely tender: we're in the mid ranges of the Himalayas as a young woman gives birth to her third child with the help of her mother, Damini. The birth brings no joy, just a horrible accounting, and the act that follows--the huge sacrifice made by Damini out of love of her daughter--haunts the novel. In Shauna Singh Baldwin's enthralling novel, two fascinating, strong-willed women must deal with the relentless logic forced upon them by survival: Damini, a Hindu midwife, and Anu, who flees an abusive marriage for the sanctuary of the Catholic church. When Sister Anu comes to Damini's home village to open a clinic, their paths cross, and each are certain they are doing what's best for women. What do health, justice, education and equality mean for women when India is marching toward prosperity, growth and becoming a nuclear power? If the baby girls and women around them are to survive, Damini and Anu must find creative ways to break with tradition and help this community change from within.

From the author of What the Body Remembers, an extraordinary story of love and espionage, cultural tension and displacement, inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan (code name “Madeleine”), who worked against the Occupation after the Nazi invasion of France. When Noor Khan’s father, a teacher of mystical Sufism, dies, Noor is forced to bow, along with her mother, sister and brother, to her uncle’s religious literalism and ideas on feminine propriety. While at the Sorbonne, Noor falls in love with Armand, a Jewish musician. Though her uncle forbids her to see him, they continue meeting in secret. When the Germans invade in 1940, Armand persuades Noor to leave him for her own safety. She flees with her family to England, but volunteers to serve in a special intelligence agency. She is trained as a radio operator for the group that, in Churchill’s words, will “set Europe ablaze” with acts of sabotage. She is then sent back to Occupied France. Unwavering courage is what Noor requires for her assignment and her deeply personal mission — to re-unite with Armand. As her talisman, she carries her grandmother’s gift, an heirloom tiger claw encased in gold. The novel opens in December 1943. Noor has been imprisoned. She begins writing in secret, tracing the events that led to her capture. When Germany surrenders in 1945, her brother Kabir begins his search through the chaos of Europe’s Displaced Persons camps to find her. In its portrayal of intolerance, The Tiger Claw eerily mirrors our own times, and progresses with moments of great beauty and white-knuckle tension towards a moving and astonishing denouement.

"With her arranged marriage in jeopardy, Sheetal Talwar attempts suicide. The woman who talks her out of it claims to be Draupadi - the Draupadi from the Mahabharat, the epic drama about the battle of the Pandava and the Kauravs three millenia ago. When Sheetal recovers and thanks her, Draupadi asks an expensive and difficult favour. Sheetal tries to evade her obligation to reciprocate - and her life begins to echo Draupadi's. Sheetal's very name means cool, and she believes we are so different now - are we?" -- Publisher's website.

Why should the very things we share create such distance between us? The short stories in this thesis illuminate a paradox: love and fear draw us together, yet drive us to extremes of separation. Olena, a Ukrainian woman, now living in Moscow, discovers that her husband's new posting will draw her dangerously close to her disapproving mother-in-law. Fletcher, a Lhasa Apso, finds himself in the middle of game between his mistress and her commitment-phobic boyfriend. Sixteen-year-old Kathleen believes her family would be normal if not for her Pakistani grandmother. Larry Reilly moves to assisted living, learns to search the net and finds out his past. Opposites clash and realign until the last story, when Dr. Karanbir Singh receives an e-mail from someone who professes to be the child of his 1980s green-card marriage. These five stories were first published in We Are Not in Pakistan 2007, Goose Lane Editions NB, Canada. Also published by Rupa Publications India, 2009.

Ten years after her stunning debut, Shauna Singh Baldwin returns with an outstanding new collection of ten stories. Migrating from Central America to the American South, from Metro Toronto to the Ukraine, this book features an unforgettable cast of characters.Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal, grew up in India, studied in the U.S., and now lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her stories have been published in Canada, India, and the U.S. in magazines such as Manushi, Hum, Books in Canada, and Fireweed.

De dochter van een Indische vader en een Amerikaanse moeder raakt in de Tweede Wereldoorlog betrokken bij het verzet als spionne voor de Britten.

In het India van 1937 neemt de echtgenoot van een 42-jarige onvruchtbare vrouw een meisje als tweede vrouw, met wie zij strijdt om de liefde van haar man en de zeggenschap over de kinderen.

Novela sobre el amor y la división de la India desde la perspectiva de la minoria SIJ.

Shauna Singh Baldwin's passionate stories dramatize the lives of Indian women from 1919 to today, from India to Canada to the US. Through the eyes of these women adjusting to change, we see a world whose familiar rhythms mask dissonance and discordance. More overt is the ongoing struggle for the Sikh women in these stories to keep their identity and assert it - the massacres of Partition and 1984 are never far away. More subtle is the cost of integration into the new world, how colonialism survives in the minds of the colonized, and how these women confront the twin fear of freedom and fear of "the other." Moving from the inner sanctums of the family to the world of the office, subway and university, Baldwin lingers sensuously on the mundane surface of her characters' lives: the jewel-like colours of turbans in the wash water, the shimmering bowls of cashews and almonds on a table, the worn magic of an abandoned house in Shimla. Slowly, almost innocuously, Baldwin reveals the unseen country her characters inhabit, only to allow this world to withdraw and emerge once again. However modern or westernized they might be, Baldwin's characters are always outsiders who inhabit silence and learn to use it, sometimes as a refuge, sometimes as a weapon. Some remain prisoners of silence, choking on their own knowledge. Some use silence as a weapon against their oppressors. Others harness its power to seize their freedom. In "Jassie," an aging, dying Indian grandmother, a foreigner in her adopted country, helps another woman come to terms with death; in "A Pair of Ears," a servant-woman wreaks revenge on an old woman's feckless son; in "Nothing Must Spoil this Visit," western and eastern women find unexpected candour and passion.