There is something almost absurd about a life being reduced to ten inches. Twenty-two years of pouring tea. Twenty-two years of knowing who wants extra ginger, who will pay tomorrow, who needs a cup on credit, who comes to the cart simply because there is nowhere else to go. Then someone draws a chalk line on the pavement and decides that those ten inches matter more. That is where Shekhar Nerala’s Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar begins to become interesting. When a Tea Ca

We call someone a stranger when we know nothing about them. But perhaps the more accurate definition is this: A stranger is someone whose story we haven't heard yet. Jay Divyam's None of Us Are Strangers begins with a little girl, an absent mother and a man who never intended to become responsible for either of them. Veer Mehra is at a Mumbai party when a woman asks him to look after her daughter, Aaruhi, for a few minutes. She doesn't return. Those few minutes be

There is something almost irresistible about a young person who refuses to give up on a dream everyone else considers unrealistic. Especially when that dream involves Bollywood. Because Bollywood has spent decades teaching us to believe that somewhere between struggle and success, there will be a turning point. A phone call. An audition. A lucky break. A stranger who notices us. A game show with a life-changing prize. And perhaps that is why Bejoy Chowdhury—Joy—feels so

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

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 a strange problem with legends. We meet them too late. By the time we hear their names, the transformation has already happened. The doubts have disappeared. The mistakes have been edited out. The person has become a symbol. Parashurama is one of those figures. We know the axe.We know the anger.We know the warrior. But who was Rama before he became Parashurama? That is where Kevin Missal's Parashurama: The Axe of Rudra caught my attention. The book begi

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

Some books arrive with noise. Big drama. Big tragedy. Big declarations about life. One Year by Sweta does something riskier. It quietly walks beside you like that exhausted colleague who waits near the office lift at 9:47 p.m., smiling weakly while pretending everything is manageable. And somewhere between those ordinary moments, the book slips under your skin. I started reading it late at night after returning from a long day myself. My daughter had left one sock near the

There’s a certain kind of silence that doesn’t feel empty… it feels watchful. The kind you don’t notice at first. The kind that slowly begins to notice you. That’s the space I found myself in while reading The Tubewell House by Abhishek Chaudhary. At one level, it’s the story of Ashank Sinha—a man who has stepped away from the velocity of Mumbai’s financial world into the deceptive stillness of a village called Lawrenceganj. But very quickly, you realize this isn’t about

Some books arrive with polish. Others arrive with pulse. The Startup Scandal felt like the second kind to me. It does not waste time trying to look clever. It simply pulls you into a world where ambition is never clean, trust is always vulnerable, and success comes with the kind of emotional invoice most people do not talk about until it is too late. What stayed with me while reflecting on this book was not just the thriller element, though that certainly gives the narrat

The most memorable stories aren’t always the loudest. Sometimes, they are the ones that warm you slowly—until you don’t notice the world has softened around you. That was the space I found myself in while reading Lallan Sweets by Srishti Chaudhary. Set in the mid-90s, the narrative doesn’t just recreate a time—it recreates a feeling. The hum of a Kinetic scooter, the quiet authority of elders, the unspoken expectations inside a family business… it all settles around you w

There are moments in life when humiliation arrives dressed as hope. I kept thinking about that while reflecting on The Day She Met Him by Kavitha Venkatesh. Not because the premise is dramatic — though it certainly begins that way — but because the emotional center of this story is painfully human. A woman waiting at a registrar’s office for a man who never shows up. A phone screen that stays silent. A future collapsing in broad daylight. Vidya’s heartbreak isn’t loud. It

There are houses you live in. And then there are houses that live in you. While reading Whispers of the Buried Past by Harshali Singh, I kept returning to that thought. This isn’t merely a haunted-haveli story. It feels more like standing in a courtyard at dusk, knowing something is watching from behind carved wooden doors that have absorbed generations of whispers. The Haveli in Old Delhi doesn’t function as backdrop — it breathes. It listens. It remembers. And that memo

There are some books that arrive quietly into your life, like an evening breeze you didn’t know you needed. Banaras: An Eternal Love Story felt like that to me—a slow, steady presence rather than a dramatic interruption. I didn’t rush through its pages. I read it the way one walks through an unfamiliar city at dawn, pausing often, absorbing more than just what is visible, letting the mood do most of the talking. Saurabh Singh places his story in Banaras not as a decorative

I read True Treasure slowly at first, the way one steps into an unfamiliar house—alert, cautious, noticing the light and the corners. By the third chapter, that caution dissolved. I wasn’t visiting anymore; I was sitting on the floor with these lives, listening. This is the kind of book that doesn’t knock loudly for attention. It waits. And somehow, you lean in. Sudha Vishwanath’s debut novel arrives without bravado, yet carries quiet confidence. There’s a steadiness to her

Some books arrive like an invitation you didn’t know you were waiting for. You open the first page expecting light chatter, a pleasant distraction, maybe a few smiles between sips of coffee—and then, somewhere between one chapter and the next, you realise you’ve been quietly pulled into a room full of lives that feel oddly familiar. The Secrets of Floor Five did that to me. It didn’t knock. It simply slid into the seat across from me and began talking, softly, honestly, until

There’s a peculiar kind of madness that only Mumbai can offer — the kind that smells like rain on asphalt, sounds like a thousand horns arguing at once, and feels like hope stubbornly pushing through chaos. Vrushali Samant’s Madness in Mumbai: When Forty Gets Naughty bottles that madness, shakes it up with heartbreak, humour, and heat — and hands it to you with a wink. It’s fizzy, messy, and utterly intoxicating. Vrushali Samant, who’s known for her sharp wit and eye for em

It began with the smell of old paper. That faint, woody fragrance that seeps into your skin when you hold a well-loved book — the kind of...