Lucky Girls

Shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Award for New Writers, Freudenberger's debut is a collection of five stories set in India and South-East Asia which explore romance, loss, betrayal and dysfunctional families against the backdrop of the cultural alienation.

A young American woman in Delhi, left in limbo by the death of her much older, married Indian lover, finally meets his mother.

Meanwhile, a 40-year-old (also American) woman, who suffers from depression, inherited from her restless, inconsistent mother travels back to India to visit her aging father, who has Alzheimers, and is being cared for by the servant who’s been with them forever, and also by his late wife’s best friend – whom he loathes.

In 'The Orphan', a couple’s journey to Thailand to tell their daughter – who’s working in a Bangkok home for babies whose parents have died of AIDS – and their lackadaisical college-boy son, that they are separating doesn’t go quite according to plan.