Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers, but her secret sets her apart. She belongs to a kind of club, which involves luxury, beautiful clothes and accessories. The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape her tedious life, to become someone else and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another? A deeply absorbing novel about the "holes" that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.

Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers, but her secret sets her apart. She belongs to a kind of club, which involves luxury, beautiful clothes and accessories. The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape her tedious life, to become someone else and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another? A deeply absorbing novel about the "holes" that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.

But when Ramu, the village simpleton, marries Laxmi, the college educated daughter of a poor farmer, their union gives birth to a miracle that will change Nandgaon forever, and there is little Mundkur can do about it. The unlikely catalyst for this transformation is Manoj Mishra, a failed PhD in history, who believes he has found the solution to rural India's poverty. And he will let nothing and no one get in the way of his mission - not his wife, nor the intricate mechanism of village and district administration. Gradually, these four very different people become embroiled in an epic confrontation in which their ideals and their very lives are at stake. The wide cast of characters in this unusual novel combines with playful irony and humour to lay bare an India that struggles daily and in innumerable ways with the overarching issue of modernization - the ethics of it, and its impact on traditional social structures.

Follmi looks beyond the noise, chaos, and sensory overload of the Indian streets to examine deeper truths surrounding the people and their culture. His compelling photographs convey beauty and stillness, reflection and contentment, and express a philosophy and an approach to life that is radically different from that of the West.