Alone Together : Selected Stories of Mannu Bhandari, Rajee Seth and Archana Varma

With an uncanny eye for the nuances of individual situations and strong evocative styles, the three writers in this volume give us an insight into the interior landscapes of characters drawn largely from the Hindi-speaking middle and poorer class.

We meet restless and frustrated characters fighting against the demands and hypocrisies of both the conservative and so-called ‘liberal’ aspects of society. Here the interior monologue is the primary form of expression, loneliness and alienation are dominant, and the personal is the chosen space for the articulation of politics. These are three profoundly existential writers and the stories, masterpieces of psychological realism.