A house is a body : stories /

Swamy's haunting debut short story collection follows various female characters who struggle with expectations and hidden desires. "Wedding Season" charts the path of a couple, Tejas and Al, as they travel to Bombay for a wedding, which forces Teja to negotiate their relationship, family conundrums, and cultural expectations. "Earthly Pleasures" follows a painter who crosses paths with a mysterious figure at a San Francisco party. As she descends into alcoholism, the realities of her internal narratives shift, raising unnerving questions. Other tales explore the complexities of domesticity and other interactions. In the probing "My Brother at the Station," the pregnant narrator reflects back on a harrowing childhood incident and is shocked when she spots her long-estranged brother, an encounter leading to a host of unanswered, possibly unanswerable inquiries. The tender "Mourners" charts and connects the varied experiences of characters amidst grief and iterations of the unknown. Spanning the geographical and social distance between India and the U.S., Swamy's 12 tales illuminate her characters' imperfections and struggles, ultimately forming an attuned and mystical exploration into the enigmas of being human.

Swamy writes with a cool precision that draws the reader into her debut collection. Eleven of the 12 stories have simple descriptive titles--"Wedding Season," "Night Garden," "Mourners," "The Neighbors"--that belie the works' complexity, and the plots unspool in lovely lucid prose that has a poetic omniscience. "The Siege" begins with this attention-getting hook: "It was the priest who smothered the horse." The first line of "Blindness"--"Sudha and Vinod had a modest wedding"--is shadowed by the meaning of the story's title. The story's heroine struggles secretly with disaffection, paranoia and nightmares despite the serene surface of her married life. "The Siege" is set in an unnamed country with regressive attitudes toward women. As the female protagonist becomes increasingly introverted and fearful, her husband gains a bravura swagger. In the long and whimsical "Earthly Pleasures," arguably the centerpiece of the book, a young woman's intimate relationship with the god Krishna leads her to a sensual awakening and a heightened sense of the world's beauty. The lone stylistic exception is the title story, written in a splintered, urgent voice that amplifies the plight of the agoraphobic mother at the center; trapped with her young daughter as a raging fire encroaches from the hillside. Swamy is off to a strong start. (Aug.)

Fear of loneliness, abandonment, and death propel these 12 stories set in the U.S. and India. In this debut collection, time is temperamental. Reality bleeds into dreams, and these dreams later shape reality. In the first entry, the sublime "Blindness," Sudha, an architect and newlywed, struggles with a husband who can't (and won't) understand her depression. A dream of an alternate life may be the only cure for her persistent "black feeling." Disaster looms large, and quirky characters find themselves trapped in hamster wheels, spinning futures they have little control over. In the stirring "Mourners," Mark's wife, Chariya, has died. His cousin Reggie as well as Chariya's sister Maya help him parent his infant daughter while he stumbles through the cruelty of grief. "He holds his breath. He is so close to it, to feeling joy, the joy of the body. But it is moving away from him. He cannot reach it." Swamy's pulsating prose produces riveting narratives. Her stories twist in subtle yet unexpected ways, and crucial revelations appear buried in the middles of paragraphs. This is certainly the case in the haunting "The Neighbors," in which a play date takes a dark turn when a mother of two small children reveals a disturbing truth to another mother she's only just met. In other stories, art serves as a space for solace and refuge amid chaos. "Earthly Pleasures" finds Radika visiting a museum's Rothko painting whenever she feels alone. "It had a way of getting into me, the painting. The room filled and emptied several times. There were moments I felt as though I was falling in." The fallible characters in Swamy's ravishing book are always falling into something and bravely grasping what they can on their way down in a frenetic attempt to pull themselves back up. A dazzling and exquisitely crafted collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.