Scroll’s August 20, 2025, feature is an excerpt from Kunzang Choden’s memoir, Telling Me My Stories: Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood, published with permission from Bloomsbury India. Choden is described by the University of Chicago Press as the first Bhutanese woman to write a novel in English—a more specific distinction than Scroll’s headline wording, “to be published in English.”
Which book does the excerpt come from?
The excerpt is from Telling Me My Stories: Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood, not from Choden’s novel The Circle of Karma. Bloomsbury presents the memoir as a series of remembered episodes and reflections, spanning Choden’s childhood in Bhutan, her schooling in India, and her later return to her family home, Ogyen Choling.
Scroll’s excerpt was published on August 20, 2025, with permission from Bloomsbury India. The Bloomsbury India listing for the memoir identifies two editions:
| Edition | Publication date | Length | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paperback | August 5, 2025 | 288 pages | 9789361313974 |
| Ebook | August 5, 2025 | 304 pages | 9789361315237 |
These are the publisher’s listed details; retailer availability varies by region. The publisher’s page links to Amazon India.
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What does Choden remember?
Leaving home for school
Bloomsbury says Choden was sent to boarding school in Kalimpong at age nine. She knew Bhumtangkha, and, according to the publisher’s account, no one else at the school spoke it. The book moves between this experience of schooling in India and memories of a remote Bhutanese village.
Family, loss and childhood fear
In the Scroll excerpt, Choden recalls a family astrological chart made for her eldest brother and the belief that he was incompatible with his parents. She recounts his death and her later fear of encountering his body at the river. She also writes that the siblings would have numbered six, but only four survived to adulthood. These are Choden’s memoir recollections, not population-level statistics.
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Returning to Ogyen Choling
The memoir also returns to Ogyen Choling, Choden’s childhood home. Bloomsbury describes her revisiting the place in the present, after it had become a museum. That movement between remembered childhood and the changed home gives the book a setting in both personal and social history.
How does the memoir fit into Bhutan’s history?
The memoir recalls life in a landed household during a period when Bhutan was changing rapidly. A 2025 review in The Tribune situates its stories in the country’s pre-reform period and describes the book as a coming-of-age narrative for both Choden and Bhutan. Choden’s own line, quoted in the review, captures the relationship between private memory and national history: “I write my story as a footnote to the larger history of my country.”
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Why is Choden’s literary milestone described in different ways?
Scroll’s headline calls Choden the first Bhutanese woman “to be published in English.” The University of Chicago Press uses a narrower, specific formulation: she was the first Bhutanese woman to write a novel in English. Its author page notes that Choden was born in Bhutan’s Bumthang district in 1952.
That distinction is associated with The Circle of Karma, first published in 2005 and reissued by the University of Chicago Press in February 2014. The childhood excerpt, however, comes from the later memoir Telling Me My Stories.
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Read the Scroll excerpt for Choden’s first-person recollections. For the full book, see Bloomsbury India’s memoir listing; its linked retailer and edition availability may differ outside India.
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