It includes stories about the 1971 War of Liberation, women's 'honor', mother-daughter relationships, the vagaries of marriage and contemporary political corruption.

Well-established women writers such as Selina Hossain and Nasreen Jehan are represented here, along with emerging writers, the better to evoke the broad range of Bengali women's literary voices. Daring in both form and theme, these stories reveal the exciting transformation that fiction writing is currently experiencing on the contemporary literary scene.

Niaz Zaman is Professor of English, University of Dhaka. Publications include the prize-winning study A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India and Pakistan; the novel The Crooked Neem Tree; and the short story anthology The Dance. Firdous Azim is Professor of English at BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has published widely on literary, cultural and women's issues, both inside and outside the country, including The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993). She is an active member of Naripokkho, a woman's activist group in Bangladesh, and is currently working on a woman's activists' memoir project.