When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

*Longlisted for the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction

Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife, but what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealized version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back—a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce, and courageous, When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means, and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.