HarperCollins India presents
an astute exploration of how we live and love today
Thirteen Kinds of Love
by
Soumya Bhattacharya
A child cares for a family of pigeons nesting in his balcony; is his parents’ relationship as diseased as the illness ravaging the baby pigeons? A man mulls over desire engendered by love and that which springs from mere lust. A couple confesses to the reader the reasons for the widening chasm between them. An intricate mesh of relationships and lives, Thirteen Kinds of Love follows the fortunes of several families living and working in an apartment block in Mumbai. This is a book about loving and losing, about trying to redeem oneself, about attempts to remake and refashion what has been torn asunder. Soumya Bhattacharya draws the reader into the narrative using his deeply evocative, distinctive prose. This is an astute exploration of how we live and love today.
‘I know of couples for whom the relationship works because it is conducted over a distance. Absence, if not making the heart grow fonder, papers over cracks that might have appeared between them. For us, it was just the other way around. Absence was just that: the lack of presence, emptiness, making us remote from each other, excluding the one from the other’s life … I just remember the growing silence; first, the silence of absence; and then the increasing silence in each other’s presence.’
A man mulls over desire engendered by love and that which springs from mere lust.
A couple confesses to the reader the reasons for the widening chasm between them.
An intricate mesh of relationships and lives, Thirteen Kinds of Love follows the fortunes of several families living and working in an apartment block in Mumbai. This is a book about loving and losing, about trying to redeem oneself, about attempts to remake and refashion what has been torn asunder. Soumya Bhattacharya draws the reader into the narrative using his deeply evocative, distinctive prose.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Soumya Bhattacharya is the author of five previous books of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sydney Morning Herald and Granta, among others. He is the managing editor at Hindustan Times and lives in New Delhi.
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