P&P Live!: Peace Adzo Medie and Shruti Swamy

Peace Adzo Medie, a brilliant scholar and a fierce advocate for women’s rights, brings us her new novel His Only Wife. Afi Tekple is a young seamstress whose life is narrowing rapidly. One day she is offered a life-changing opportunity—a proposal of marriage from the wealthy family of Elikem Ganyo, a man she doesn’t truly know. She acquiesces, but soon realizes that Elikem is not quite the catch he seemed. It turns out that he is in love with another woman, of whom his family disapproves; Afi is supposed to win him back on their behalf. This is the story of an indomitable and relatable heroine that illuminates what it means to be a woman in a rapidly changing world.

Shruti Swamy's collection, A House Is a Body, introduces a bold and original voice in fiction, from a writer at the start of a stellar career. Dreams collide with reality, modernity with antiquity, and myth with identity in twelve arresting stories. In “Earthly Pleasures,” a young painter living alone in San Francisco begins a secret romance with one of India’s biggest celebrities, and desire and ego are laid bare. In the title story, an exhausted mother watches, hypnotized by fear, as a California wildfire approaches her home. Immersive and assured, provocative and probing, these are stories reveal small but intense moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.