Posts from the relationships category.
I thought I was signing up for a high school romance. What I got was a heartbreak so raw, I ended up hugging my pillow like it owed me comfort. Laura Nowlin’s If He Had Been With Me doesn’t just tell a story—it takes you by the hand, pulls you into the messy corridors of teenage life, and then leaves you with a silence that echoes long after the final page.At its heart, this is the story of Autumn...
There are books you stumble upon, and then there are books that feel like they find you at exactly the right moment. Whispered Melodies by Preethi Venugopala belongs to that second category. I picked it up on a quiet evening, planning to read a few chapters before bed. Let’s just say sleep was abandoned without regret. Preethi, who’s already penned over a dozen novels and carved a space for hersel...
There are books that entertain you, and then there are books that quietly walk into your heart and stay there. The Circle of Life by Sudha Murty is one such book. Reading it felt like sitting down with an old friend over a cup of chai and talking about life — the dreams we once had, the people we met along the way, and how everything somehow comes full circle.Sudha Murty, as we know her, is no str...
The second half of the year has begun. The specialty is there would be many long weekends because of the festivities. It’s the time of the year when I wallow of not having the “family friends” which our parents were blessed with in their generation. Maybe they were just the neighbours or colleagues who became family, but there were picnics held, day trips done to temples etc. Now, in the big metro...
Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling like you “won” — but also kind of lost? That’s exactly where Jermaine Pusey’s Communication Is Not a Competition begins: in those quiet, often painful moments when being technically right left us emotionally wrong. In a world where debates seem louder than ever and social media rewards the wittiest clapback, this book is a breath of fresh air.J...
A few months ago, I stood at Mumbai airport, watching planes take off, wondering what kind of stories the pilots flying them held close. Once in Cape Town gave me one. Sanchit Grover, a pilot turned author, brings us his second book after Luck, Fluke or Destiny? — but this time, he doesn’t just tell a story; he straps you into a cockpit of emotions, lets you fall in love mid-air, and crash into so...
Sometimes a book finds you — not the other way around. I remember picking up I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced during a quiet evening, thinking I’d flip through a few pages before bed. What I didn’t know was that this slim memoir, written by a girl not even out of primary school, would leave me sleepless and wide-eyed, grappling with questions no ten-year-old should ever have to answer.This is the ...
What does it mean to be a mother? Is it biology, emotion, sacrifice—or a bit of all of them? Anagha Paranjape-Purohit’s Two and a Half Story isn’t just a novel—it’s an emotional excavation of motherhood, abandonment, and the ache of finding one’s place in a world that offers more questions than answers.This is Anagha’s debut, and let me tell you—it doesn’t read like one. There’s a maturity and qui...
You know how sometimes you pick up a book, expecting just another life story, and then it gently surprises you—like a quiet conversation with an old soul who has seen it all and still believes in love, resilience, and purpose? That’s exactly what happened when I read An Unlikely Chemistry by S. Krishnaswamy.For those unfamiliar, Krishnaswamy is not your average memoirist. He’s a filmmaker known fo...
Have you ever read a story so raw and real that it makes you pause and question the world we live in? The Journey of a Mother is exactly that kind of book. It’s not a fictional drama written for shock value—it’s the lived, painful truth of Sagarika Chakraborty, a mother whose battle wasn’t just against a foreign government, but against a deeply flawed system, a crumbling marriage, and her own brea...
