Summer of Then

A Novel

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A twenty-six-year-old English literature PhD student negotiates between her writing and her livelihood, her morality and her heart, her self-hood and her family’s history. Working odd jobs as a proofreader and researcher, she strays along a classically directionless path, finding herself in a stultified marriage and a similarly immobile but romantic adulterous relationship with her husband’s best friend.

Summer of Then is a debut novel that relishes the interiority of women, especially about the often-unsettling intimacies of relationships—sexual, romantic and platonic—against the trauma of sexual assault and harassment. Set across Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, and even Edinburgh, Scotland, this coming-of-age novel crosses paths with the India of the 2010s, exploring the trickle-down effect of politics into academia and college life in Indian metropolitan cities, leading us just to the point of the incipient anxieties and beginnings of the 2020 pandemic.

In the vein of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, the novel’s protagonist has a sparse, yet deeply compelling voice that pays attention to precise emotional and social detail, exposing a range of motion between observational commentary and introspection.