Bøger af Urmilla Deshpande

Ginny slips through the cracks of her parents divorce and grows up like a weed. Sometimes tragic, sometimes funny but always sexy, she improvises her way through her days with unintended honesty and compulsive joy, and very little morality of the conventional kind. This Pack of Lies is Ginny's ruthless look at her unlikely life in Bombay in the eighties. She is quite unintentionally disturbing in her look at divorce, incest, friendship, and sexuality. It is not Ginny who lies, but the world around her that refuses her candor, denies her truths, and turns her away as the girl who cries wolf. In a life measured by touch and taste, there seems very little, after all, to lie about. This novel feels uncomfortably like a memoir, but, as the title declares, it is A Pack of Lies.

What would happen if one did steal, commit adultery, covet one's neighbour's goods, even murder…and break all the rules we were taught to live by? Each story in this first-of-its-kind collection takes you into a realm where people are prompted by love, desire, jealousy, hatred and, at times, a strange compassion, to throw out the old, conventional rules, and make their own. The title story, 'Body and Blood', is a macabre revelation of how far one can go when one loves someone before all others, even God; in 'Honour. Or Not', a young girl abused by her father since the age of thirteen finds a shockingly unexpected way of 'honouring' him when he dies.In a lighter vein, the protagonist in 'Sunday Snow Job' asserts that working girls have to work, even on the Holy Sabbath, while Gomes in 'Heart of Gold' finds it is possible to covet your neighbour's wife and get rich too. 'Wakulla' raises the question: can stealing be an act of compassion, and not a sin? In 'Fall', Srinivas discovers that one can make love to one's best friend's wife without actually committing adultery. And coveting your neighbour's goods is fine-as long as they are the right ones, as 'Elegy in a Churchyard', the tenth story in this rivetting collection, teaches us.Written with panache and by turns erotic, tongue-in-cheek and shocking, this is a collection of noir and black humour at its best.