I have always found something slightly unsettling about telephone calls. Maybe it is because you cannot see the person on the other end. You hear a voice, but you don't know what the face behind it looks like. You cannot tell whether someone is speaking calmly because they are genuinely calm, or because they are trying very hard not to fall apart. Sometimes there is a pause. Sometimes there is silence. And sometimes, you realise that the person on the other end may

I have a confession. I like books that make me stop reading. Not because they are boring. Quite the opposite. Because sometimes I am reading a page and suddenly I have to look up and say, “Wait. What?” That happened quite a few times with What the What?! And, honestly, that is probably the best possible reaction to this book. I came to it expecting a book of strange facts, trivia and questions. I got that. But somewhere between one bizarre fact and another

There are some questions that are asked because we don't know the answer. And then there are questions we ask because we are afraid of what the answer might mean. Am I a Dalit? belongs to the second category. Vijhay Sundar K.G.'s novel begins in a world where caste is not an abstract idea discussed in textbooks. It is present in families, relationships, social behaviour, humiliation and the choices people are allowed to make. But what makes the novel interesting is that

There is something deeply comforting about certainty. We like knowing why things happen. We like clear answers, predictable outcomes and explanations that neatly close the conversation. We live in a time that makes this even easier. Algorithms predict what we might want next. Search engines find answers in seconds. Experts speak with enormous confidence. Even social media has turned complicated questions into simple opinions. And then comes a book with the rather mischiev

Some love stories end. Some simply learn to exist differently. That is what stayed with me after reading Ashritta Saran’s Parallel Heartbeats. Ash and Aaryan find each other when they are young enough to believe that loving someone deeply should be enough. But growing up has a way of complicating even the purest emotions. Ambition enters. Distance enters. Circumstances enter. And eventually, two people who once felt like each other’s entire world have to discover who they

We often imagine that the most dangerous secrets in a relationship are the ones someone tells us. Perhaps they aren't. Perhaps the more dangerous ones are the secrets someone successfully keeps from us. That thought stayed with me while reading Anubha Gupta's The Almost Perfect Wife. Because beneath the murder mystery, the twists and the ancestral house in Mashobra, this is really a story about something much more uncomfortable: how little we may actually know about the

When a Border Separates Two People, What Exactly Does It Fail to Separate? Some love stories are about two people trying to find each other. Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG is about something more difficult: two people trying to remain connected when history has decided they belong on opposite sides of a border. That distinction stayed with me. Because we often talk about Partition through numbers—millions displaced, families separated, lives destroyed, borders re

We have spent years asking whether artificial intelligence will destroy humanity. Akshay Chopra's After Us asks a more unsettling question: What if it doesn't? What if the intelligence we create is benevolent? What if it solves problems we couldn't? What if it understands us better than we understand ourselves? What if it doesn't need to hate humanity to make humanity irrelevant? That possibility stayed with me long after I finished the book. After Us begins with id

There are people who look lonely. And then there are people who have become so good at living alone that nobody thinks to ask if they are lonely. Meera is one of them. At fifty, she has a job. A routine. A home. A life that, from the outside, seems perfectly manageable. She wakes up. Goes to work. Comes back. Follows her routines. Nothing is falling apart. Except perhaps Meera herself. That is where Sindhura Chamala’s Parts of Living quietly gets under your skin

Sometimes the hardest goodbye is not the one we say to another person. It is the goodbye we keep postponing inside ourselves. That is where I Cannot Say Goodbye to You finds its emotional strength. At first glance, the title can make you expect a familiar romance—love, separation, heartbreak, and the difficult business of moving on. But Rithvik Singh’s first romance novel reaches somewhere more uncomfortable. It asks what happens when a person grows up believing that the

Every generation believes its struggles are unique. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. Anxiety has a different name today. Overthinking has become a personality trait. Career pressure begins before adulthood. Social media has turned comparison into a daily habit. We carry entire conversations inside our heads long after they have ended. That is exactly where The Gita for Gen Z by Rania Sen begins. Not on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. But on the battlefield insid

Ghost stories have survived every generation despite living in an age that insists on logic. We have better science, better technology, and endless explanations for things our ancestors could only fear. Yet we continue to read stories about haunted houses, restless spirits, and unexplained encounters. Perhaps that is because ghost stories have never really been about ghosts. They are about the emotions that refuse to die. Enakshi Sengupta's Only He Could See Them understands

Some books arrive loudly, demanding attention from the very first page. I Am, I Can, I Will by Ruby Kapoor arrived differently. It felt like walking into a railway station long after midnight and noticing a lone tea vendor still awake under a flickering tube light — tired perhaps, but steady, warm, and quietly present for whoever needed comfort before the next journey. That is the emotional frequency of this book. Ruby does not try to dazzle the reader with oversized wisd

There are romance novels that feel manufactured entirely out of fantasy, and then there are books like Claim that understand something darker about attraction — how sometimes two wounded people don’t fall in love gently. They collide like storms over a city already carrying too much damage beneath its skyline. That was the feeling I carried through most of this book. Not softness. Collision. I had wanted Drake Fallahil’s story ever since he appeared earlier as the fierc

There are romance novels that entertain you for a few hours, and then there are the rare ones that quietly crawl under your skin and stay there like a bruise you keep pressing just to feel something again. That was my experience with Love The Way You Lie by Aarti V Raman. Somewhere between the sharp emotional tension, the exhaustion both characters carry like hidden wounds, and that devastating climax which genuinely stole the air from my lungs, this story stopped feeling lik

There is a particular kind of loneliness that hides behind competence. The kind carried by people who know how to fix systems, solve crises, protect others — but have absolutely no idea what to do with tenderness when it finally arrives. That was the feeling that stayed with me while reading The Pieces of Me: A Grumpy Sunshine Millionaire Romance by Aarti V Raman. This is technically a grumpy-sunshine romance. A former hacker with shadows stitched into his past meets a chee

Some love stories feel less like fireworks and more like an old wound reacting to rain. That was the feeling I carried while reading You Won't Be Mine by Aarti V Raman — a second-chance romance that understands something many modern love stories forget: heartbreak is rarely loud when it matures. Sometimes it becomes routine. A silence. A room you continue living inside long after the other person has left. There’s a particular emotional texture to this novel that stayed w

Some books speak about healing. Some books quietly sit beside suffering without trying to decorate it. While reading Hope Takes Wings by GK. Balasubramani, I kept feeling as though I was walking through a hospital corridor at dawn — that strange hour when machines still beep softly, exhausted doctors hold paper cups of tea, and families stare at doors carrying equal amounts of faith and fear. Hospitals are usually described through statistics, reports, prescriptions, an

Some books entertain you for a few hours. Some books make you feel as if you’re walking through dimly lit lanes at midnight, watching shadows move before the detective notices them. Deadly Clues: Detective Victor Rises by Amritendu Mukherjee gave me exactly that feeling. A few nights ago, I had planned to read “just one story” before sleeping. That familiar lie every reader tells themselves. But somewhere between poisoned drinks, disappearing bodies, blind men hiding se

There’s a particular kind of silence that exists between fathers and children. Not anger.Not distance either. Just years of unfinished conversations sitting quietly at the dining table. That silence kept returning to me while reading Yaar Papa by Divya Prakash Dubey. Not because the novel tries too hard to make you emotional, but because it understands something uncomfortable about Indian families — many fathers spend their entire lives proving themselves to the world w