New Delhi, July 6 -- There is a striking irony at the heart of Caro Claire Burke's debut novel, Yesteryear. It's protagonist Natalie Heller Mills builds a lucrative online career romanticising traditional womanhood, presenting domestic life through carefully composed images of motherhood, homemaking and rural abundance. Then, quite literally, she gets what she has wished for.

Burke takes a premise that could have easily become broad satire and grounds it in something far more thoughtful. When Natalie finds herself in the nineteenth century, the gap between aesthetic nostalgia and lived reality becomes impossible to ignore. The endless labour of keeping a household running, the dangers surrounding childbirth, and the lack of autonomy avai...