Book description
This is the story of Rukmini who is married to the District Collector of a small town in Assam, and teaches English literature in the local college. On the surface, her life is settled and safe in the big, beautiful bungalow on the hill above the cremation ground, seemingly untouched…
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Why read it?
1 author picked The Collector's Wife as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I am partial to any fiction set in my part of the world, the cultural hodgepodge called Northeast India. And Mitra Phukan is one of the region's best novelists.
Here, a bored and lonely college lecturer is washed up in a small town in Assam. With her husband often away on official duties, she quietly observes the mediocrity of the middle-class lives around her, even as the sectarian strife of the 1980s flickers in the background and then comes devastatingly close.
A slow-paced novel about violent change, hidden desires, and the strangeness of teaching canonical English literature in a setting…
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