Parini Shroff
2024 PFWA
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
In a small village in India, a husband disappears without a trace, and his wife Geeta is presumed by the villagers to be his killer. Soon, other women in the village are asking her for help getting rid of their own husbands. In her razor-sharp debut, The Bandit Queens, Shroff serves up a commentary on class, power dynamics and the role and sanctioned abuses of women in India. While serious in theme, The Bandit Queens is surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny. Shroff received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a practicing attorney living in the San Francisco Bay area.
"A radically feel-good story about the murder of no-good husbands by a cast of unsinkable women.”—The New York Times Book Review. “Shroff cleverly considers how women might achieve autonomy within rural India’s patriarchal society.” —Washington Post
The Bandit Queens has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in fiction.
Books
Copies of every title are available from Vroman's Bookstore at the festival.
The Bandit Queens
In a small village in India, a husband disappears without a trace, and his wife, Geeta, is presumed by the villagers to be his killer. Soon, other women in the village are asking her for help getting rid of their own husbands. In her razor-sharp debut, The Bandit Queens, Shroff serves up a commentary on class, power dynamics and the role and sanctioned abuses of women in India. While serious in theme, The Bandit Queens is surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny.