Book Review: Erotic Stories For Punjab Widows

Elderly widows cheeky’s journey into erotica leads to a whole lot more.

Joshua Poh
4 min readJan 13, 2019

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Published by William Morrow on June 13, 2017
Pages: 304
Format: eBook
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

Singaporean-born novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal has never been one to shy away from exploring complex, sometimes controversial issues in her novels. Her debut novel Inheritance explored mental health issues, homosexuality and dysfunctional dynamics of a Punjab family in Singapore whereas followup Sugarbread explored racism in Singapore.

With her third novel, Kaur takes her formidable pen and a keen eye to the taboos surrounding sexuality in South Asian culture. Writing Erotic Stories for Punjab Widows in a response to a ‘what-if’ question — how did women in her grandmother’s generation experience sex and sexual desire in an overly traditional, male-dominated culture? Can they give voice to those yearnings in an insular Punjab society?

Erotic Stories for Punjab Widows follows our headstrong protagonist Nikki, a 22-year-old modern, independent woman living in London caught between two distinct worlds…

--

--