Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • An Apple Canada Best Ebooks of 2024 • A CBC Books' Best Canadian Fiction of 2024
A breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman, from the Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth.

What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.

A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.

With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.

Shashi Bhat's short fiction has been published in several journals, including PRISM Interntaional, Event Magazine, The Threepenny Review, and The Missouri Review. Her story "Why I Read Beowulf" appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 24, and her story "Indian Cooking" was a finalist for the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Writers' Trust Award. She currently resides in Halifax, where she teaches at Dalhousie University.

Shashi Bhat's profile page

• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • One of Apple Canada’s Best Ebooks of 2024 • CBC Books' Top Pick for Most Anticipated Canadian Fiction for Spring 2024 • One of Time Magazine's Must Read Books of 2024
“Bhat creates characters through careful analysis overlaid with irony and wit. She sets out to uncover and expose the dynamic intricacies that beset contemporary women, in particular. . . . A formidable presence in the expanding worlds of Canadian literature, Shashi Bhat explores the tensions between traditional South Asian families and the feminist impulses of a younger generation. While her stories are often humorous, they are also wise accounts of women trapped in conventions that militate against them.”
—David Staines, Literary Review of Canada
“These stories open a view onto a world that will likely be very familiar to many women, whether they are South Asian or not, and there’s no doubt that South Asian women raised in Canada will be able to see elements of their own experiences. . . . Death by a Thousand Cuts is a grimly fitting title.”
—British Columbia Review

"The wry female characters in Death By a Thousand Cuts are so genuine and evocative, it is impossible not to empathize with them. All of Bhat's stories possess a sharp-eyed restraint, and they will astonish and move you with their darkly glittering moments of hilarity and depth. Within these pages you will find poignancy, humour, and unflinching insight on the precarity and absurdity that is contemporary female life. Bhat is an undeniably talented storyteller and an indelible voice in modern fiction. I loved this collection!!!"
—Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality

“Death By a Thousand Cuts made me scream with laughter nearly as often as it made me scream with rage. Shashi Bhat’s distinctive, powerful collection is so raw and vivid that it feels alive. This is a piercing, absorbing, and unforgettable book.”
—Sarah Jackson, author of A Bit Much

“In these masterful stories about dating apps, consent, COVID lockdown, exes who write revenge novels, and the body, which so often betrays itself, Shashi Bhat writes scenes of contemporary life with such wit and aplomb you almost don’t realize they’ve also broken your heart. I love these stories so much.”
—Liz Harmer, author of Strange Loops

“Hot damn. Through her original stories, Shashi Bhat dissects the subtle indignities of modern womanhood with a scalpel and reassembles them into something beautiful. A thousand cuts indeed.”
—Anna Fitzpatrick, author of Good Girl