There’s something unsettling about the idea that six ordinary days can reroute an entire life.   Not years. Not decades. Six days.   That quiet tension hums beneath Six Days in Bombay, the latest standalone from Alka Joshi, and it caught me off guard. I went in expecting historical richness and atmospheric detail. I did not expect to feel personally confronted by a young nurse’s hunger for a life larger than the one she’d been handed.   We meet Sona Falstaff in 1937 Bombay —

There are cities you visit. And then there are cities that sit inside you like unfinished conversations.   Reading Kolkata Ø KM by Swati Bhattacharyya felt less like turning pages and more like wandering through a house of echoes. Not haunted in a loud, theatrical way. Haunted the way memory is — soft-footed, patient, persistent.   This is not a book that rushes. It lingers. It circles. It asks you to sit with moments most of us hurry past.   What stayed with me most was the

Book cover of Birthday Stories  edited by Haruki Murakami featuring minimalist design and birthday-themed imagery. There is something quietly unsettling about birthdays once you cross a certain age. The cake is still sweet, the candles still flicker, but beneath the ritual there is an inventory being taken. What did I become this year? What slipped away unnoticed?   That is the emotional temperature of Birthday Stories, curated by Haruki Murakami — not festive, not nostalgic

There’s something quietly unsettling about a tree that watches you. Not in a mythical, larger-than-life way — but in the way an old house watches its inhabitants age, fracture, betray, and forgive. That was the feeling I carried through The Parijat Tree and Other Stories by Sameer Nagarajan — the sense that these stories are not merely told, they are observed. Closely. Patiently. Almost clinically at times.   This collection moves across decades of Indian life — from the 70s

Some love stories don’t explode. They simmer. And Musafir Café feels exactly like that—two cups of chai growing cold between conversations that were never fully finished.   Divya Prakash Dubey places us gently into the lives of Sudha and Chander, two people introduced through the most traditional route possible—a parental matrimonial setup—only to find themselves questioning the very institution that brought them together. Sudha, a divorce lawyer who has watched marriages unr

Pune is the second city I’ve loved deeply, after Mumbai. I’ve been there countless times—often enough to know the older parts by instinct, to recognise the quiet charm of its lanes, and to slowly understand the language of its newer, faster edges too. If life ever asked me to move away from Mumbai, Pune would be the only city I’d agree to without a long internal argument. It has that rare quality of familiarity without ownership, closeness without pressure. Reading Pune Junct

I finished Uneasy Spaces on an evening that promised nothing memorable. The room was familiar, the day had been uneventful, and my mind was already drifting toward routine thoughts. Yet when I closed the book, something inside me refused to move on. I wasn’t overwhelmed or shaken in any obvious way. I was simply… altered. As if I had spent time listening to people speak softly about their lives, and their voices had followed me into the silence afterward. That, I think, is th

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

The first thing Brahma-Patra made me do was slow down. Not metaphorically. Physically. I remember reading the opening pages late at night, phone dimmed, the room quiet except for a ceiling fan slicing the air, when I realised my thumb had stopped its impatient scroll. This wasn’t a book that wanted to be consumed. It wanted to be sat with. Like a letter you don’t open in one go, because you know once you do, something inside you will shift.   Shiv Shankar Jha is not a loud wr

Some books announce themselves loudly. They clear their throat, adjust their spectacles, and declare, “I have something important to say.” The Daughters of Shantiniketan doesn’t do that. It sits beside you quietly, like someone at a café who doesn’t interrupt your thoughts—until, suddenly, you realise they know exactly what you’ve been thinking all along.   I began this novel expecting a family saga steeped in Bengali tradition and Tagore’s legacy. I did not expect it to feel

There are books that arrive quietly, like soft rain tapping on a window. And then there are books like Wellness—that kick the door open, sit across from you in the dim light of a late-night café, and ask the kind of questions you’ve been trying very hard not to look at directly. The kind of questions that feel like staring into a mirror for too long.   What if love isn’t something we fall into once, but something we must choose again and again, even when the magic dissolves a

I didn’t ease into When I Hit You — it felt more like stumbling into a scene already in motion. The kind where the camera is trembling, the soundtrack has gone silent, and you realise you’ve entered a story that isn’t waiting for you to settle in. Friends had mentioned how intense it was, but nothing prepares you for the way this book grips your collar and says, “Stay. Watch.” A few pages in, I knew I wasn’t reading for leisure; I was witnessing a life being peeled open.   Me

There are some books that don’t just tell a story — they unspool a silence you’ve been carrying within yourself. The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay is one of them. I remember reading it late one evening, the rain tapping against my window like a nervous confession. By the time I closed the book, I wasn’t sure whether it was the rain outside or the one that had started within me.   Madhuri Vijay, in her debut, doesn’t announce herself with fireworks. She arrives like mist — quietl

There are books that entertain you, and then there are books that quietly sit beside you — like an old friend, gently reminding you who you really are. Bonds by Tirtho Banerjee belongs to the latter. It doesn’t shout for attention. It lingers. It breathes. It listens. And somewhere between its ten short stories, it holds up a mirror — not to the extraordinary, but to the heartbreakingly ordinary moments that make us human.   I first picked up Bonds expecting to read about peo

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...

The first time I picked up Tales from the Absurd, I half-expected a neat little box of stories where everything had its place, logic...

Imagine this: you’re on a train, the hum of wheels against tracks lulling you into that half-dreamy state where thoughts wander. You pull...

You know that moment when you close a book and just…sit there, staring into nothing, because your mind hasn’t caught up with your heart?...

There are some books that don’t just whisper stories—they wrap you in their silence until you feel it pressing against your skin. Aparna...

You know those books that feel less like you’re reading and more like you’ve been dropped into another century, salt wind in your hair,...