Set in Mumbai and translated from the rhythms of the city's streets into supple, lyrical English, The Parcel is a novel about bodies treated as commodities under systems of poverty, caste and patriarchy.

At its centre is Madhu, an ageing hijra and former sex worker who receives an unexpected "parcel": a young girl destined for the city's brothels. What begins as an act of delivery gradually becomes an impossible moral reckoning, forcing Madhu to confront the compromises, violences and tendernesses that have shaped a lifetime of survival.

Anosh Irani has long been recognised as one of the most distinctive chroniclers of contemporary India, and The Parcel is perhaps his bleakest and most compassionate work. Rather than reducing its characters to symbols of victimhood, the novel dwells in contradiction, showing how exploitation reproduces itself through love, dependency and the desperate search for dignity. Irani's prose is richly sensory and often startlingly beautiful, creating moments of grace amid profound brutality. Readers drawn to writers such as Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy or Toni Morrison's explorations of structural violence will find a novel that refuses easy redemption while insisting on the humanity of those pushed furthest to the margins.

2017 Australian paperback edition published by Scribe. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, unmarked interior.