Ladies Coupe - Tapa blanda

"A deeply serious, enjoyably lucid book about real terrors and joys, full of sensual and surprising details" (Scotland on Sunday)

"Nair conveys her protagonist's dilemmas with a freshness and charm... Her writing [has] a sharpness and immediacy that lifts it above the commonplace" (The Times)

"Modern India's vivid, sticky beauty is evoked beautifully... Nair's compassion for her characters shines through every carefully chosen word" (Sunday Tribune)

"Anita Nair demonstrates convincingly that she is a writer committed to highlighting the travails and contradictions of women's lives. Her strength lies in bringing alive everyday thoughts, desires and doubts of these six ordinary women" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Nair is a powerful writer... She has created what must be one of the most important feminist novels to come out of South Asia" (Daily Telegraph)

Meet Akhilandeswari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider. Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women she is travelling with the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to feel complete?

This wonderfully atmospheric, deliciously warm novel takes the reader into the heart of women's lives in contemporary India, revealing how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with husbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same the world over.