Shauna Singh Baldwin

The Selector of Souls begins with a scene that is terrifying, harrowing and yet strangely tender: we're in the mid ranges of the Himalayas as a young woman gives birth to her third child with the help of her mother, Damini. The birth brings no joy, just a horrible accounting, and the act that follows--the huge sacrifice made by Damini out of...

Every so often a passionate and subversive feminist subtext surfaces in Shauna Singh Baldwin's astonishing first novel...The individual stories and complex religious and philosophical divisions are woven into the larger picture with supreme confidence and a poetic intensity. The characters shimmer with life, their predicaments grab the reader on...