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

There’s a particular sound that echoes through Indian homes—a sharp intake of breath followed by a whispered, scandalised question: Aiyyo… what will the neighbours say? It’s not just a sentence. It’s a mood. A warning. Sometimes even a full-blown philosophy of life. I smiled the moment I opened Aruna Nambiar’s Aiyyo, What Will the Neighbours Say? because I knew, instinctively, that this book understood that sound better than most people ever will.   Reading these thirteen sto