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‘Gloriously provocative… female sexuality within a patriarchal world is Chughtai’s central concern’ Kamila Shamsie, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, from the introduction Lifting the Veil is a bold and irreverent collection of writing from India’s most controversial feminist writer. These stories celebrate life in all its complexities: from a woman who refuses marriage to a man she loves to preserve her freedom, to a Hindu and a Muslim teenager pulled apart by societal pressures, to eye-opening personal accounts of the charges of obscenity the author faced in court for stories found in this book. Wickedly funny and unflinchingly honest, Lifting the Veil explores the power of female sexuality while slyly mocking the subtle tyrannies of middle-class life. In 1940s India, an unlikely setting for female rebellion, Ismat Chughtai was a rare and radical storyteller born years ahead of her time.’Ismat Chughtai is known for her iconoclastic, feminist writings which explored the inner workings of women’s lives’ Huffington Post