Lucky girls - Nell Freudenberger

In June, 2006, Picador launch Picador Shots, a new series of pocket-sized books priced at 1. The Shots aim to promote the short story as well as the work of some Picador's greatest authors. They will be contemporarily packaged but ultimately disposable books that are the ideal literary alternative to a magazine.

Lucky Girls is a the story of twenty-five year old American, who has found herself in India, rootless, living according to unfamiliar rules and having an affair with a married Indian man. When he dies suddenly, she feels strangley bound to her adopted country and decides not to return home but stay and face the judgement of his mother and ex-wife.

Nell Freudenberger perfectly encapsulates the emotions of living abroad - the sense of dislocation the yearning, the painful conciousness of social gulfs and the relief of slipping into fantasy. Lucky Girls is written with the kind of brisk understatement that signals real talent.