Book Testimonials

Shashi Tharoor

Diplomat and Author of Mid-Night to Millennium

"Daughters of Kerala" is a marvellous collection of first-rate stories, skillfully translated by Achamma Chandersekaran, which marks a welcome addition to the English-speaking world's appreciation of Malayalam literature.
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Braj Kachru

Author, Professor, Researcher

The collection provides a touching chronicle of the contexts of women's experiences, frustrations, and struggles in the changing social order of that exciting part of India. The vivid translations open a window for non-Malayalam speakers in India and beyond to yet another regional facet of the world of Indian women...
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Lyn Richmond

Translator of Geoffrey Chaucer: The Parliament of Birds

To immerse one-self in these stories is to be drawn into a strange magic. Part of the strangeness is the juxtaposition of matter-of-fact modernity with a quality of absolute timelessness...
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Vaikom Murali

Literary Columnist Darsanam

An extraordinary translation of Malayalam short stories comes out of Achamma Chandersekaran's magical touch of translation...
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M.V. Pillai

M.D.

Achamma Chandersekaran's latest work Daughters of Kerala is one part an impressive anthology of Kerala women's whirl into the 21st century and another part an artfully distilled essence of the crème de la crème of prose fiction in contemporary Malayalam literature.
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Gita Bhatia

Daughters of Kerala offers a rare insight into the innermost beings of Kerala women and their relationship with men in a context not easily available in the West. Chosen with an open mind from a vast sea of short stories in Malyalam, each story is a brilliant gem that is meant to enjoyed and treasured, one at a time. I would highly recommend this book for a program in Women's studies and for some deeply satisfying reading.

Carla Danzinger

Author

DAUGHTERS OF KERALA: 25 SHORT STORIES BY AWARD-WINNING AUTHORS, translated from Malayalam by Achamma Chandersekaran, provides a fascinating read for anyone interested in the art of the short story, international literature, women's studies, or simply learning more about other cultures.
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Joseph Mercer

Author

Daughters of Kerala is a fascinating collection of short stories from an area full of beauty. To a westerner these stories offer a glimpse into a culture where marriage is usually arranged rather than chosen by the bride, and where women often find themselves stuck in a role of servitude...
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The Hindu

Online Edition of India's National Newspaper

Portraying Women of Kerala

Something profound seems to touch you when you turn the pages of Daughters of Kerala, a collection of Malayalam short stories translated by Achamma Chandersekaran. Something that transports you to another world, the existence of the real, and one might believe, even the unreal. Of lives that merely existed, those that rebelled and even those that chose to re-exist in multifarious ways.
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J Kalarical

Writer, Critic

Daughters of Kerala is an exhilarating read. Translated glowingly to English from Malayalam, the twenty-five short stories bristle with the flame and ice of complex human relations...
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Carole Hayes

Thanks to their adept translator, Achamma Coilparampil Chandersekaran, the stories in Daughters of Kerala preserve each author's distinctive voice. At the same time, the collection raises universal questions about the lives of girls and women. The book will make a welcome text in a course in world literature, women's studies, or short fiction. Daughters of Kerala will also appeal to the individual reader seeking a book as entertaining as it is informative.

Marie Varghese

PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University

One of the great strengths of this anthology comes from the variety of voices that are featured in these stories. These stories represent the experiences of women from variety of economic backgrounds; narratives of the urban middle class ('A Rented House'), the working poor ('Wooden Dolls'), and the Malayalee elite ('One Still Picture Cannot Capture a Life's Story') offer fascinating insights into the intersections of women's roles in relation to social class.
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