For My Sister - Shah Puja

Winner of the 2022 International Impact Book Award for Women's Fiction

Amla and Asya are sixteen-year-old twins living with their family in a small village outside of Mumbai. While they look alike, they are very different. Asya is known for her quiet grace and understanding, whereas Amla questions authority and breaks rules.

Their lives change overnight when their mother becomes ill with cancer and their father succumbs to the massive financial strain of her care in Mumbai and eventually abandons his children. To the twins' dismay, their grandparents arrange their marriages to older men. When they form a plan and run away to join their mother in the hope for a new life, the girls discover that the world is not what they thought.

After trusting the wrong people, a long train ride brings them to the dark streets of India's largest red light district where they are sold to a ruthless woman. Their only security is each other . . . until they are separated. Though they each discover ways to cope through poetry, art, and romance, they long for the other half of themselves. Will their lives ever intertwine again?