When forced to marry a Naga or face execution, Serena soon realizes that despite the awkward situations brought on by their cultural and anatomical differences, life with her new husband may not be so bad after all.

A marriage of convenience between a human female and a lizardman gives rise to some epic awkwardness, humoristic misunderstandings, and a sweet romance as they work through their differences and solve the danger threatening their clan.

RBC Bronwen Wallace Award winner Noor Naga's bracing debut, a novel-in-verse about a young woman's romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. 2021 Arab American Book Award - George Ellenbogen Poetry Award, Winner Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Winner Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Longlist Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry, Second Place Winner CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He's also married. Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo's spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo's life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.

A woman agrees to quirky, humorous, and unconventional marriage of convenience with a hybrid birdman empath to save her human colony from an impending war.

‘It took my mother, Khonuo, exactly forty-five years before she could bring herself to talk about the war.’ These powerful words introduce the reader to Easterine Kire’s stunning new novel, A Respectable Woman. In Nagaland, the decisive Battle of Kohima has been fought and won by the Allies, and people in and around Kohima are trying hard to come to terms with the devastation, the loss of home and property, and the deaths of their loved ones. Forty years after the event, Khonuo recreates this moment, stitching together her memories, bit by painful bit, for her young daughter. As memory passes from mother to daughter, the narrative glides seamlessly into the present, a moment in which Nagaland, much transformed, confronts different realities and challenges. Using storytelling traditions so typical of her region, Kire leads the reader gently into a world where history and memory meld — where, through this blurring, a young woman comes to understand the legacy of her parents and her land.

“I was the youngest in a family of five children. I sometimes felt I was an afterthought, and maybe Father and Mother didn’t quite know what to do with me. Also, because I was a girl after four boys they never seemed to be sure whether to buy me girls’ clothing or let me wear leftover boys’ clothing.” Young Dielieno is five years old when she is sent off to live with her disciplinarian grandmother who wants her to grow up to be a good Naga wife and mother. According to Grandmother, girls didn’t need an education, they didn’t need love and affection or time to play or even a good piece of meat with their gravy! Naturally Dielieno hates her with a vengeance. This is the evocative tale of a young girl growing up in a traditional society in India’s Northeast, which is in the midst of tremendous change. Easterine Kire writes about a place and a people that she knows well and is a part of and brings to the storytelling a lyrical beauty which can on occasion chill the reader with its realistic portrayals of the spirits of the dead that inhabit the quiet hills and valleys of Nagaland.