What do you think?
Rate this book
Life on Mars
Two lonely people connect briefly during the Covid pandemic. A woman finds companionship with an unusual young man the same age as her absent sons. A one-night stand in Rishikesh ends in a surprise not once, but twice. Kunti and Gandhari, queens in the evening of their lives, try to cope with their private griefs after the slaughters of the Kurukshetra war. A swan relates the story of the doomed lovers Nala and Damayanti. After one man drowns and another is saved, a stone reflects on the inner lives of men and stones.
200 pages, Hardcover
Published January 15, 2025
1 person is currently reading
2 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 11, 2026
Namita Gokhale’s ‘Life on Mars’ unfolds like a series of quiet transmissions from lives lived slightly out of phase with the world around them.
The stories do not announce themselves with dramatic openings or narrative urgency; instead, they ease the reader into states of mind marked by distraction, irony, and a persistent sense of mild estrangement.
The title story, “Life on Mars,” sets the tonal register for the entire collection. Its central metaphor—of living as though one were on another planet—captures not a condition of radical alienation but something subtler: the feeling of inhabiting one’s own life at a remove, as if observing it through glass. The protagonist’s emotional distance from her marriage, her routines, and even her own desires is not born of crisis but of accumulation, the slow sedimentation of compromise. This sense of emotional drift recurs throughout the collection, binding the stories together less by plot than by mood.
In “Life on Mars,” Gokhale introduces one of her most characteristic figures: the middle-aged woman who is articulate, educated, self-aware, and yet strangely unmoored. The story resists any climactic moment of revelation. Instead, it lingers on small observations—snatches of thought, bodily discomforts, half-articulated resentments—that never quite coalesce into action.
This refusal of resolution is not a failure of narrative but a deliberate aesthetic choice, one that mirrors the postmodern condition of lives shaped less by decisive events than by prolonged states of ambiguity. The protagonist’s sense of living elsewhere, on an emotional Mars, is never explained away or cured. It is simply allowed to exist.
Several stories in the collection return to marriage as a central site of this estrangement. In “A Husband’s Call,” the act of communication itself becomes fraught. A phone call from a husband is less an intimate gesture than a reminder of distance, of how language can fail even when it is dutifully exchanged. The story examines the gap between what is said and what is meant, between the performance of marital concern and the emotional emptiness that often underlies it. Gokhale is particularly attuned to the ways in which women learn to manage this gap, filling silences with thought rather than speech, accommodating disappointment without naming it. The marriage in this story does not collapse; it simply continues, altered only by the protagonist’s heightened awareness of its hollowness.
In “The Habit of Love,” desire appears not as a disruptive force but as a routine, something that has settled into predictability. The story explores how love, once passionate, becomes habitual, its gestures repeated long after their original intensity has faded. Gokhale does not romanticise this transformation, but neither does she condemn it. Instead, she observes it with a cool, almost anthropological interest, suggesting that the endurance of relationships often depends less on feeling than on habit. The protagonist’s awareness of this truth does not liberate her; it merely situates her more clearly within her own life.
Once again, insight does not lead to action, and the story’s power lies precisely in this anticlimax.
A similar tension animates “The Long Silence,” where what remains unsaid within a relationship takes on a weight greater than any spoken conflict. Silence in this story is not a sign of peace but of exhaustion, the result of years spent negotiating differences that no longer feel worth articulating. Gokhale’s prose here is especially restrained, allowing the emotional charge to build through omission rather than emphasis. The story suggests that silence can be both a form of self-preservation and a symptom of resignation, a duality that runs through much of the collection.
Not all the stories in ‘Life on Mars’ are confined to the domestic sphere, though even those that venture outward retain a strong focus on interiority. In “The Reluctant Traveller,” movement—across cities, perhaps even across borders—fails to produce the transformation one might expect. Travel, often imagined as a means of escape or self-discovery, becomes instead another occasion for introspection. The protagonist carries her emotional life with her, finding that distance does not necessarily bring clarity.
The story gently mocks the idea that geographical mobility can resolve psychological stagnation, reinforcing the collection’s broader skepticism toward narratives of liberation.
In “The Bridge,” Gokhale explores the idea of connection more explicitly. The bridge of the title functions as both a literal and metaphorical structure, a place where encounters occur but rarely endure. The story is attentive to fleeting moments of intimacy—conversations with strangers, shared glances—that promise connection without fulfilling it.
These moments are not insignificant; they provide brief relief from isolation. Yet they are also transient, leaving the protagonist with a heightened awareness of her own solitude. The bridge becomes a symbol of postmodern sociality: a space of passing contact rather than lasting bonds.
Aging is a recurring preoccupation in the collection, particularly in stories like “The Mirror” and “Time’s Witness.” Here, the female body becomes a site of quiet negotiation. Gokhale writes about aging without melodrama, focusing on small, often unremarkable details: the way a reflection surprises its viewer, the way time seems to accelerate even as the body slows down. These stories resist the cultural narratives that frame aging as either decline or wisdom.
Instead, aging is presented as a condition of ongoing adjustment, one that reshapes desire, ambition, and self-perception without offering compensatory insights.
In “The Mirror,” the act of looking becomes charged with anxiety and recognition. The protagonist confronts not only her physical aging but the gap between who she imagined herself becoming and who she has, in fact, become. The mirror does not provoke a crisis; it prompts a quiet recalibration. This moment encapsulates Gokhale’s larger project in ‘Life on Mars’: to explore how self-knowledge accumulates gradually, often without leading to dramatic change.
The story “Solitude” examines loneliness not as an aberration but as a normalized state. The protagonist’s solitude is not the result of social exclusion but of choice, habit, and circumstance. Gokhale complicates the usual binaries of loneliness and independence, suggesting that solitude can be both burdensome and sustaining. The story’s refusal to resolve this tension reflects a postmodern reluctance to assign fixed meanings to emotional states. Solitude, like marriage or desire, remains unstable, its value shifting according to context and perspective.
Throughout the collection, Gokhale employs a prose style that is deceptively simple. Her sentences are economical, often carrying more implication than explicit meaning. This stylistic understatement allows irony to surface organically, without overt authorial commentary. The irony in ‘Life on Mars’ is never cruel; it does not expose characters in order to ridicule them.
Instead, it highlights the discrepancies between intention and outcome, between self-image and lived reality. This irony is particularly evident in stories like “The Art of Adjustment,” where the protagonist prides herself on adaptability, only to realize that adjustment has become a form of self-erasure. The story does not condemn this realization; it merely presents it, allowing the reader to sit with its discomfort.
The urban settings of the stories are sketched lightly, almost indifferently. Cities appear as functional spaces—apartments, offices, cafés—rather than as spectacles. This muted urbanity reinforces the collection’s inward focus. The city is not an antagonist or a promise; it is simply the environment in which these lives unfold. Gokhale resists the temptation to make the urban landscape symbolic or dramatic, instead treating it as a backdrop against which interior dramas quietly play out.
What unites the stories in ‘Life on Mars’ is not a shared narrative arc but a shared sensibility. Gokhale’s characters are keen observers of their own lives, yet observation does not translate into transformation. This gap between awareness and action is central to the collection’s postmodern ethos. In a literary culture that often privileges stories of empowerment and resistance, ‘Life on Mars’ offers something more ambiguous: an exploration of how people live with constraint, how they make peace with compromises without necessarily celebrating them.
The collection’s feminist significance lies not in overt critique but in its sustained attention to women’s inner lives. Gokhale does not frame her protagonists as victims, nor does she present them as triumphant survivors. They exist in the uneasy space between these categories, negotiating social expectations with varying degrees of success. Their thoughts, memories, and minor rebellions constitute a form of quiet resistance, one that operates below the level of public action.
By the time the reader reaches the final stories, there is a cumulative sense of having inhabited multiple variations of the same emotional landscape. The repetition is deliberate, reinforcing the idea that these experiences are not isolated but systemic. Living “on Mars,” in Gokhale’s formulation, is not an individual failure but a shared condition of contemporary life, particularly for women whose aspirations have been shaped and constrained by social norms that promise fulfillment but rarely deliver it.
‘Life on Mars’ ultimately refuses the consolations of closure. Its stories end not with answers but with pauses, moments of suspended thought. This refusal can be unsettling, especially for readers seeking narrative satisfaction. Yet it is precisely this openness that gives the collection its quiet force.
Gokhale suggests that literature need not resolve the tensions it depicts in order to be truthful.
Sometimes, to name a condition—to articulate the feeling of living at a distance from one’s own life—is itself a meaningful act.
In presenting these lives with such careful attention and ironic compassion, Gokhale creates a body of work that is deeply attuned to the textures of contemporary existence.
‘Life on Mars’ does not offer escape, transformation, or redemption. Instead, it offers recognition. It invites the reader to acknowledge the small, persistent estrangements that shape everyday life, and to see them not as personal failures but as part of a larger, shared human condition.
Most recommended.
The stories do not announce themselves with dramatic openings or narrative urgency; instead, they ease the reader into states of mind marked by distraction, irony, and a persistent sense of mild estrangement.
The title story, “Life on Mars,” sets the tonal register for the entire collection. Its central metaphor—of living as though one were on another planet—captures not a condition of radical alienation but something subtler: the feeling of inhabiting one’s own life at a remove, as if observing it through glass. The protagonist’s emotional distance from her marriage, her routines, and even her own desires is not born of crisis but of accumulation, the slow sedimentation of compromise. This sense of emotional drift recurs throughout the collection, binding the stories together less by plot than by mood.
In “Life on Mars,” Gokhale introduces one of her most characteristic figures: the middle-aged woman who is articulate, educated, self-aware, and yet strangely unmoored. The story resists any climactic moment of revelation. Instead, it lingers on small observations—snatches of thought, bodily discomforts, half-articulated resentments—that never quite coalesce into action.
This refusal of resolution is not a failure of narrative but a deliberate aesthetic choice, one that mirrors the postmodern condition of lives shaped less by decisive events than by prolonged states of ambiguity. The protagonist’s sense of living elsewhere, on an emotional Mars, is never explained away or cured. It is simply allowed to exist.
Several stories in the collection return to marriage as a central site of this estrangement. In “A Husband’s Call,” the act of communication itself becomes fraught. A phone call from a husband is less an intimate gesture than a reminder of distance, of how language can fail even when it is dutifully exchanged. The story examines the gap between what is said and what is meant, between the performance of marital concern and the emotional emptiness that often underlies it. Gokhale is particularly attuned to the ways in which women learn to manage this gap, filling silences with thought rather than speech, accommodating disappointment without naming it. The marriage in this story does not collapse; it simply continues, altered only by the protagonist’s heightened awareness of its hollowness.
In “The Habit of Love,” desire appears not as a disruptive force but as a routine, something that has settled into predictability. The story explores how love, once passionate, becomes habitual, its gestures repeated long after their original intensity has faded. Gokhale does not romanticise this transformation, but neither does she condemn it. Instead, she observes it with a cool, almost anthropological interest, suggesting that the endurance of relationships often depends less on feeling than on habit. The protagonist’s awareness of this truth does not liberate her; it merely situates her more clearly within her own life.
Once again, insight does not lead to action, and the story’s power lies precisely in this anticlimax.
A similar tension animates “The Long Silence,” where what remains unsaid within a relationship takes on a weight greater than any spoken conflict. Silence in this story is not a sign of peace but of exhaustion, the result of years spent negotiating differences that no longer feel worth articulating. Gokhale’s prose here is especially restrained, allowing the emotional charge to build through omission rather than emphasis. The story suggests that silence can be both a form of self-preservation and a symptom of resignation, a duality that runs through much of the collection.
Not all the stories in ‘Life on Mars’ are confined to the domestic sphere, though even those that venture outward retain a strong focus on interiority. In “The Reluctant Traveller,” movement—across cities, perhaps even across borders—fails to produce the transformation one might expect. Travel, often imagined as a means of escape or self-discovery, becomes instead another occasion for introspection. The protagonist carries her emotional life with her, finding that distance does not necessarily bring clarity.
The story gently mocks the idea that geographical mobility can resolve psychological stagnation, reinforcing the collection’s broader skepticism toward narratives of liberation.
In “The Bridge,” Gokhale explores the idea of connection more explicitly. The bridge of the title functions as both a literal and metaphorical structure, a place where encounters occur but rarely endure. The story is attentive to fleeting moments of intimacy—conversations with strangers, shared glances—that promise connection without fulfilling it.
These moments are not insignificant; they provide brief relief from isolation. Yet they are also transient, leaving the protagonist with a heightened awareness of her own solitude. The bridge becomes a symbol of postmodern sociality: a space of passing contact rather than lasting bonds.
Aging is a recurring preoccupation in the collection, particularly in stories like “The Mirror” and “Time’s Witness.” Here, the female body becomes a site of quiet negotiation. Gokhale writes about aging without melodrama, focusing on small, often unremarkable details: the way a reflection surprises its viewer, the way time seems to accelerate even as the body slows down. These stories resist the cultural narratives that frame aging as either decline or wisdom.
Instead, aging is presented as a condition of ongoing adjustment, one that reshapes desire, ambition, and self-perception without offering compensatory insights.
In “The Mirror,” the act of looking becomes charged with anxiety and recognition. The protagonist confronts not only her physical aging but the gap between who she imagined herself becoming and who she has, in fact, become. The mirror does not provoke a crisis; it prompts a quiet recalibration. This moment encapsulates Gokhale’s larger project in ‘Life on Mars’: to explore how self-knowledge accumulates gradually, often without leading to dramatic change.
The story “Solitude” examines loneliness not as an aberration but as a normalized state. The protagonist’s solitude is not the result of social exclusion but of choice, habit, and circumstance. Gokhale complicates the usual binaries of loneliness and independence, suggesting that solitude can be both burdensome and sustaining. The story’s refusal to resolve this tension reflects a postmodern reluctance to assign fixed meanings to emotional states. Solitude, like marriage or desire, remains unstable, its value shifting according to context and perspective.
Throughout the collection, Gokhale employs a prose style that is deceptively simple. Her sentences are economical, often carrying more implication than explicit meaning. This stylistic understatement allows irony to surface organically, without overt authorial commentary. The irony in ‘Life on Mars’ is never cruel; it does not expose characters in order to ridicule them.
Instead, it highlights the discrepancies between intention and outcome, between self-image and lived reality. This irony is particularly evident in stories like “The Art of Adjustment,” where the protagonist prides herself on adaptability, only to realize that adjustment has become a form of self-erasure. The story does not condemn this realization; it merely presents it, allowing the reader to sit with its discomfort.
The urban settings of the stories are sketched lightly, almost indifferently. Cities appear as functional spaces—apartments, offices, cafés—rather than as spectacles. This muted urbanity reinforces the collection’s inward focus. The city is not an antagonist or a promise; it is simply the environment in which these lives unfold. Gokhale resists the temptation to make the urban landscape symbolic or dramatic, instead treating it as a backdrop against which interior dramas quietly play out.
What unites the stories in ‘Life on Mars’ is not a shared narrative arc but a shared sensibility. Gokhale’s characters are keen observers of their own lives, yet observation does not translate into transformation. This gap between awareness and action is central to the collection’s postmodern ethos. In a literary culture that often privileges stories of empowerment and resistance, ‘Life on Mars’ offers something more ambiguous: an exploration of how people live with constraint, how they make peace with compromises without necessarily celebrating them.
The collection’s feminist significance lies not in overt critique but in its sustained attention to women’s inner lives. Gokhale does not frame her protagonists as victims, nor does she present them as triumphant survivors. They exist in the uneasy space between these categories, negotiating social expectations with varying degrees of success. Their thoughts, memories, and minor rebellions constitute a form of quiet resistance, one that operates below the level of public action.
By the time the reader reaches the final stories, there is a cumulative sense of having inhabited multiple variations of the same emotional landscape. The repetition is deliberate, reinforcing the idea that these experiences are not isolated but systemic. Living “on Mars,” in Gokhale’s formulation, is not an individual failure but a shared condition of contemporary life, particularly for women whose aspirations have been shaped and constrained by social norms that promise fulfillment but rarely deliver it.
‘Life on Mars’ ultimately refuses the consolations of closure. Its stories end not with answers but with pauses, moments of suspended thought. This refusal can be unsettling, especially for readers seeking narrative satisfaction. Yet it is precisely this openness that gives the collection its quiet force.
Gokhale suggests that literature need not resolve the tensions it depicts in order to be truthful.
Sometimes, to name a condition—to articulate the feeling of living at a distance from one’s own life—is itself a meaningful act.
In presenting these lives with such careful attention and ironic compassion, Gokhale creates a body of work that is deeply attuned to the textures of contemporary existence.
‘Life on Mars’ does not offer escape, transformation, or redemption. Instead, it offers recognition. It invites the reader to acknowledge the small, persistent estrangements that shape everyday life, and to see them not as personal failures but as part of a larger, shared human condition.
Most recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review