Aunt Who Wouldn't Die
At eighteen, Somlata married into the Mitras: a once noble Bengali household whose descendants have taken to pawning off the family gold to keep up appearances.
When Pishima, the embittered matriarch, dies, Somlata is the first to discover her aunt-in-law's body - and her sharp-tongued ghost.
First demanding that Somlata hide her gold from the family's prying hands, Pishima's ghost continues to wreak havoc on the Mitras. Secrets spilt, cooking spoilt, Somlata finds herself at the centre of the chaos. And as the family teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, it looks like it's up to her to fix it.
The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die is a frenetic, funny and fresh novel about three generations of Mitra women, a jewellery box, and the rickety family they hold together.
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay was born in 1935 in present-day Bangladesh. He earned a Master's degree from Calcutta University and worked for some time as a schoolteacher before becoming a journalist and author. The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die is a much-loved contemporary classic in Bengali, and was adapted into the film Goynar Baksho in 2013. The first English translation was published in India in 2017.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Over 45 of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, he has also won the Muse India award for translation and been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He is the Books editor of Scroll.in, and teaches at Ashoka University. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.