When Sudha Balagopal describes food, you get hungry. When she describes sadness, you feel tears in your own heart. And so it is with Nose Ornaments, this finely crafted family saga of Lakshmi, and her daughter, Savi, and Savi’s daughter, Mini. Spanning years and geographies and cultures, we see how each woman lives in her particular time. So much changes in terms of men and marriage and work life. It’s a testament to how women adapt and blossom. But even more than that, it is the exquisite detail of Balagopal’s writing which is so precise and sensory, you may very well feel that you are not just reading this beautiful story, but living it as well.
— Francine Witte, author of RADIO WATER and The Way of the Wind

Sudha Balagopal’s Nose Ornaments spans three generations of strong women who don’t succumb to their circumstances, who make decisions, and who have the agency to turn unfavorable situations into opportunities. These are women who seek, women who resolve, women who guide. Throughout the story, Sudha, with her skill and sensitivity, examines the delicate relationships between mothers and daughters that, despite love, are fraught with complexities and misunderstandings. It is an emotional ride filled with hope and sensory details. Not to be missed.
—Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, Author of Morsels of Purple and Skin Over Milk

Sudha Balagopal takes us on a journey spanning three generations and two continents, dealing love, heartache, tradition, and surprise in supercharged miniature doses. Each story in this novella pops with poignancy, with beauty, and with profundity. I loved reading this book and want to read it again.
—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories

Paperback ISBN 978-1-915247-62-9; 133mm x 203mm; 94pp

£10.99 GBP

A highly addictive read! I picked up Things I Can’t Tell Amma just for a taster first, and then I finished it in two reading bursts. It’s a moving novella-in-flash about the compromises a young woman has to make in order to survive and fit in a new country — but also, how she never forgets what truly matters and where she comes from.
~ Sophie van Llewyn, author of Bottled Goods.

There are many things that 22-year-old Deepa can’t tell her mother back in India now that she’s studying in Arizona. There are things she can’t tell the unfriendly librarian, or her shady professor, or her Indian would-be suitor, or the typist who sells her a typewriter, or prospective employers, but she’d like to tell her neighbor Theo how she feels about him. You’ll fall in love with Deepa as her story unfolds in these fifteen finely wrought flash. Warm, funny, and endearing, Sudha Balagopal’s Things I Can’t Tell Amma is a brilliant novella-in-flash, by a writer at the top of her form.
~ Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl.

Told from the perspective of Deepa, a young woman who arrives as a stranger in a new country, Things I Can’t Tell Amma is an inventive novella-in-flash that explores how one navigates strange cultural norms and a yearning to belong. Even as this narrator tries to move on from her mother’s expectations, she finds her new life bewildering, adventurous, and full of heartbreak and love. Balagopal is a virtuoso of expressing the minutiae of things. A trapped quail finds its nest, the missing letter of a typewriter, the notes of a jingle from the 1980s, a limp doll hangs from a rearview mirror. This sensational novella is a gift you will want to unwrap again and again.
~ Dan Crawley, author of Straight Down the Road and The Wind, It Swirls

In this affecting novella in flash, a young woman leaves India to study in America. Balagopal expertly captures the tug between yearning for the familiar and wanting to find one’s place in a new world. In one flash, “The Missing I” Deepa buys a used typewriter for her term papers, only to find a broken key. When she complains, the vendor says: “Just write the damned ‘I’ in.” A clever metaphor for Deepa’s journey. The ambiguous ending left me hoping Deepa finds a way to “build a bridge across oceans.”
~ Damhnait Monaghan, author of The Neverlands, best novella 2020 Saboteur Awards.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-912095-35-3; 133mm x 203mm; 68pp

£9.99 GBP