or

Compare Prices for Operation Monsoon: Stories

In Shona Ramaya's tough, lyrical, and ironic stories of a globalized India, pop culture and history fuse

When you bring on the rain, everything changes, my grandmother had said. It's not the same place anymore. The rain takes over.

Set in a globalized community of merging cultures, Operation Monsoon offers an India where Hindu epics are broadcast as soap operas and kidney donations have supplanted reincarnation. These intricate, multilayered accounts show how people use stories to make sense of their lives in an incomprehensible world. A girl romanticizes about a distant cousin, a terrorist in exile, amid the intoxicating Calcutta monsoons. A crippled woman runs a matchmaking agency on the Internet. An IT consultant finds himself on a strange journey in America as he enters the shadow world of "bodyshopping."

Shona Ramaya, praised by Cosmopolitan as a "born storyteller" and by Mira Nair as a writer who "has the rare talent of knowing her characters so well that when you finish the book, you feel they have spoken to you," presents an India of radical transitions, exploring junctures where history or myth cross paths with contemporary events.