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 —

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

Some people are afraid of heights. Some are afraid of failure. And some are afraid of the one moment where everything is supposed to look perfect.   The Landing begins in the cockpit, but it quickly makes it clear that the real descent is internal.   First Officer Anvi Singh is the kind of woman our culture celebrates without hesitation — disciplined, decorated, precise. A rising star trusted with lives thousands of feet above ground. She is trained for chaos. She knows her c

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

Some books don’t take you back to school. They take you back to a feeling. A tightness in the chest. A silence you learned to live with. IX B: The Fragile Heart of an Achiever did that to me—not by reminding me of my own classroom, but by pulling me into a memory I hadn’t connected to school life until now.   I grew up in a co-ed environment. Boys, girls, shared benches, shared laughter, shared awkwardness. So, when people talk about the “only boys’ school experience,” I usua

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 some books you don’t read — they read you. They peel you open like an orange, sting the soft inner parts you thought you’d hidden well, and leave you sitting in silence long after the final page has closed. The Bell Jar is that kind of book. I picked it up on a tired Tuesday night, expecting a literary classic with polite gloom, maybe a sprinkle of poetic sadness. Instead, it dragged me by the collar straight into the suffocating hush of a mind unravelling — and I’m