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Chrysalis

Anuja Varghese

3.93/5 (580 ratings)

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Winner of the Canadian Governor General's Literary for Fiction

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the monstrous and the mundane.

Poetic, sensual, and surreal, Varghese’s stories delve into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation through an unapologetically feminist lens. Drawing on folklore, fairy tale, and magical realism, they take aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revel in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.