Sangat - Denver Book Club

📍 Heads up: this first meetup is in a common area of the organizer's apartment building. The exact address and entry details will be shared in the event chat once you RSVP.

This October is our first mango and chili pairing: two books from opposite sides of the world that shouldn't go together, and probably do.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, is the International Booker–winning story collection. In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

The Yield by Tara June Winch won the Miles Franklin Award. A Wiradjuri woman returns home to Australia for her grandfather's funeral and finds the family land about to be lost to a mining company. Woven through her story is the dictionary of Wiradjuri words he spent his last years writing.

We'll figure out what they have to say to each other.

Come having read one, both, or some of both. Half-finished? Still come. Hated it? Definitely come. Heart Lamp is a story collection, so even a couple of stories will give you plenty to talk about.

We'll also pick November's book (or books) together at this meetup, so bring your suggestions.

Open Sangat is a reading circle for stories from everywhere, especially the ones that don't usually get a seat at the table: voices shaped by migration, colonialism, and marginalized experiences. The name comes from sangat, the company we keep.