Book Review: Four Angry Women by Kabita Singha (Translated by Shamita Das Dasgupta)

Team Kitaab reviews Four Angry Women by Kabita Singha (The Antonym Collections, 2026), and notes how reading it feels like growing up in a city that never stops watching.

Coming-of-age novels often promise transformation. The young protagonist leaves innocence behind, discovers a sense of self, and arrives, by the final page, with a clearer understanding of the world. Kabita Singha has little interest in such reassuring arcs. Four Angry Women, her first full-length novel, follows four girls—Bulan, Renu, Suman, and Chuni—as they move through late adolescence in 1970s Kolkata, but what it captures is not a journey toward certainty. Instead, it dwells in the messier business of becoming: of trying on identities, making mistakes, finding solace in friendship, and confronting a society that has already decided what kind of women they ought to be.

The novel opens onto a Kolkata alive with contradiction. It is a city where political unrest and intellectual excitement exist alongside deeply entrenched social conventions. Streets, neighbourhoods, classrooms, and family homes come with its own rules, its own expectations of how a young woman should speak, behave, and imagine her future. Singha writes the city with an intimacy that comes from knowing its rhythms. Kolkata is never reduced to scenery. It presses itself into every decision the girls make, every risk they take, every dream they nurture.