India, Jan. 10 -- In Burns Boy, the unnamed mother of Guru and Aparna says, "Then I thought maybe he [Guru] didn't like my stories, and that thought terrified me, even more than him not liking me anymore." Krupa Ge entangles a mother's steadfast endurance against her child's hatred for her with her writer self's vulnerabilities and fear of rejection. She puts a woman's creations at odds with each other in a family drama that unfolds through three narrators.

15-year-old Guru finds himself in the unusual position of being in a burns ward filled with women as victims of dowry demands, suicides, failed love -something that's beautifully explored in Imayam's A Woman Burnt, translated by GJV Prasad (2023). He was raised by his grandmother who ...