Book Review:- Thirteen Kinds of Love

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Author: – Soumya Bhattacharya

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 200

Price: Rs. 399 INR (paperback)

Author: – Soumya Bhattacharya

Soumya Bhattacharya is an Indian journalist and author. As a journalist, he has worked on The Times (London), The Sydney Morning Herald, India Today magazine (New Delhi), The Telegraph (Kolkata) and the Hindustan Times. He is currently the Editor of Hindustan Times.

Blurb

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.

Review

“Never judge a book by its cover” and this book is a perfect example of it. As I grabbed a cop[y of the book, I thought it would be a book with 13 love stories while I was glad that the author proved me so wrong. Thirteen Kinds of Love is a beautiful collection of stories of residents of a posh residential tower Imperial Heights in Bandra, Mumbai. Stories of modern love; love of a wife for his husband, of a little boy for a bird family, a love that was nothing more than lust and many more. In these 13 stories, the author has used a very different way of presenting his point. In a story when a little boy is fascinated about a bird family while his own family is at the verge of separation. The author has beautifully used the nature to depict the right emotion. The righting style of the author is unusual & commendable.

Then comes a story of a man, whose wife is long dead and a story of a man whose frequent international work trips makes him thing that cheating on this wife wasn’t a big deal. Soumya Bhattacharya, with his grasping narration and creative writing, has been successful in gluing the readers to the book. The author at times narrates the story as emails or text messages between characters or diary entries which is quite different from the traditional storytelling.

The cover of the book, which is designed by Rashmi Gupta, need a special mention here. The cover perfectly justifies the book and the stories. It has all the elements that played a significant role in the stories. From a telephone to different faces of love and character, each one of those has a place on the cover.

So overall, the book is a must read for its brilliant style of writing and storytelling and also to have a glimpse of the modern love that has many different faces.