Ladies Coupe - Hardcover

Anita Nair

3.69

6,306 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701173157 ISBN 13: 9780701173159

Publisher: CHATTO WINDUS, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Meet Akhila: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider - until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to feel complete?

This wonderfully atmospheric, deliciously warm novel takes the reader into the heart of women's lives in contemporary India, revealing how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with hunsbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same world over.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Anita Nair lives in Bangalore, India. Her books have been published in several languages around the world.

From Booklist:

At 45, Akhila awakes one day with a "fight-or-flight" notion. So she boards a train's ladies coupe (a segregated, second-class compartment found on most overnight Indian trains until 1998) and journeys from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. After her father's death many years ago, she became the head of her family's household. Breadwinner and martyr, she has sacrificed her desires to fulfill her family's wants and needs. A question has long weighed on her mind: Can a woman live without a man and be happy? The women Akhila meets on the train car respond with their life experiences. Nair's novel is feminist, but it is much more than that as Nair sensitively explores the intimate feelings of her women characters not only in vivid descriptions of their Indian lives, but also in the pleasure they take in something as simple as enjoying a forbidden egg. Nair is a powerful writer, who through this tender story shows great understanding and compassion for all women and for the choices and regrets they cannot avoid. Janet St. John
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.