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 that glitter at night. And then there are cities that swallow light whole.   Reading City Without Stars by Tim Baker felt like walking through one of the latter — a place where hope doesn’t disappear dramatically; it erodes quietly, layer by layer, until even the sky feels complicit.   Set in Ciudad Real, a fictionalised border town echoing the tragedies of Juárez, the novel drops us into a landscape where cartel wars rage in the shadows and hundreds of women