Lucky girls - Nell Freudenberger

Lucky Girls is a collection of five stories, set in India and Southeast Asia, narrated by young women who find themselves face to face with the compelling circumstances of adult love. Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways-and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to landscapes and cultures that are strange to them.

In 'Lucky Girls', an American woman who has been involved in five-year affair with an Indian man feels bound, after his death, to her memories of him, and to her adopted country. The protagonist of 'Outside the Eastern Gate' returns to her childhood home in Delhi, where her mother, years before, abandoned the family for a dangerous journey across the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. And in 'Letter from the Last Bastion', a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a middle-aged novelist, who confides in her the secret truth of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam.

Lucky Girls marks the arrival of a writer whose clarity of intellect and emotion set her among today's most gifted and exciting young voices.