Twenty-five long years after the war that was supposed to liberate Bangladesh and that instead, for far too many people, merely brought fear, violence, and loss a young researcher arrives on the doorstep of one survivor in Dhaka, Mariam, armed with a set of questions that have no easy answers. How did Mariam and women like her who lived through violence and rape survive the war? How did the Pakistani army deal with women they found in homes, offices, or colleges? Why did Mariam send her brother away to keep him safe even as she stayed on? For Mariam, however, these questions are irrelevant her demons are different. Could she have saved her brother, she wonders? And what happened to the other men in her life? What did the war do to them, and to her? A powerful novel of shattering war and its aftermath, The Search tells of the difficulty of picking up the pieces and moving on after personal and national trauma.

Translated from the original anthology in Bengali. Throwing light on the work and lives of unknown or forgotten Muslim women writers of pre-Independence Bengal, when the state was not yet partitioned between India and East Pakistan (today's Bangladesh), in 1947, this anthology is like a rediscovery of their lives. First published in Bengali as Zenana Mehfil: Bangali Musalman Lekhikader Nirbachita Rachana, 1904-38, it compiles, for the first time, eleven Bengali Muslim women's writings: essays, short stories, poetry, a novel and some correspondence, each introduced and discussed separately. This anthology also gives a glimpse of their lives that were not always confined within the household. The writers include Akhtar Mahal, Sayyada Khatun and M. Fatema Khanum, and other much more familiar names like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Shamsundar Mahmud. Among the immensely valuable interviews are those of Mohammed Nasiruddin, who devoted his life to the cause of Bengali Muslim women's emancipation, his daughter Nurjehan Begum, the poet Sufia Kamal, the writer Hameeda Khanam and Syed Mustafa Siraj, the celebrated Bengali novelist who witnessed the social changes that were to alter the Bengali Muslim world.

Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world - noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).