A Delhi laundromat becomes a doorway to another world, a woman paints storms into existence, a purveyor of poisonous teas deals in death, and in an amnesiac world, a woman searches for herself. Each story conjures its own reality and plays by its own strange rules.

In thirteen stories, Sabina Malik dissolves the borders between fairy tale and dystopia, romance and rebellion, the everyday and the impossible—mapping the lives of women who refuse the worlds they’re given.

Magical, unsettling, and deeply human, Jaya’s Paper Heart fuses the literary and the speculative into something wholly its own—a collection where defiance becomes survival and imagination becomes power.