Deotima Sarkar

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Deotima Sarkar rated a book really liked it

The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire

by Rajat Chaudhuri (Goodreads Author)

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Deotima Sarkar said: " The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire

A pair of rain-soaked shoes, an old Chinese record of snowfall, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the Sundarbans, farmers marching for justice, Rajat Chaudhuri finds his way into the climate qu ...more "

Sep 02, 2026 12:23AM · see review

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The First House: A Novel

by Avni Doshi (Goodreads Author)

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Deotima Sarkar said: " There is something wonderfully unsettling about the way The First House refuses to remain a marriage story. Avni Doshi takes the end of a thirteen-year marriage and opens it into something older and stranger, family mythologies, inherited fears, astr There is something wonderfully unsettling about the way The First House refuses to remain a marriage story. Avni Doshi takes the end of a thirteen-year marriage and opens it into something older and stranger, family mythologies, inherited fears, astrology, female desire, ritual, memory and the violence that can flourish inside the very places we call home.

The mythology is never ornamental. Headless women, goddesses, Diana, sacrifice and fate seep into the narrator’s consciousness until the ancient and the contemporary begin to resemble one another. Even Durga Puja in Kolkata acquires a strange resonance, with the familiar image of the goddess becoming entangled with questions of womanhood, power and violence.

And then there is water.

A childhood prophecy that the family will die by drowning becomes an inheritance of its own, fear passed down almost as faithfully as blood. Swimming is avoided; water becomes something to be feared, remembered and eventually confronted. But beneath this prophecy lies another, more intimate danger, the emotional and psychological abuse within the family, the humiliations, control and wounds that have shaped its members long before the marriage begins to fracture.

That is what makes the novel so difficult to reduce to a story about divorce. The marriage is one wound; the family is another, and neither can really be understood without looking at the other.

Doshi moves between the domestic and the mythic with remarkable confidence. A family argument can carry the weight of an omen, while a goddess, a cicada or a body of water can suddenly feel intensely intimate. Her narrator, too, remains gloriously difficult to categorise, flawed, contradictory, sometimes cruel, sometimes painfully perceptive.

The First House is strange, dark and deeply disquieting. It leaves no convenient distinction between fate and choice, victim and perpetrator, home and captivity.

Perhaps its most haunting suggestion is that the stories we inherit are not always the ones that haunt us most.

Sometimes it is what everyone in the family knows and nobody names. ...more "

Sep 01, 2026 11:38PM · see review

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More Days at the Torunka Café: The Scent of Happiness (Days at the Torunka Café, #2)

by Satoshi Yagisawa

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Deotima Sarkar said: " There is something about a small cafe that makes the world feel temporarily softer. You sit with a cup of something warm, watch people come and go, and somehow the things that seemed too complicated begin to feel a little easier to hold.

So I settled There is something about a small cafe that makes the world feel temporarily softer. You sit with a cup of something warm, watch people come and go, and somehow the things that seemed too complicated begin to feel a little easier to hold.

So I settled into the book with exactly that kind of afternoon in mind.

Satoshi Yagisawa's novel returns to the Torunka Cafe in Tokyo, bringing together three people whose lives are very different, but each carrying something unresolved.

Chiyoko, a long-time customer, has spent twenty years returning to the café. When she hears a Chopin piece, memories of a first love she thought belonged firmly to the past begin to surface. Kōta, Shizuku's childhood friend, is trying to understand his feelings while navigating his instinct to protect the people he cares about. And Ayako, an illustrator struggling with creative exhaustion, is forced to reconsider both her work and her past when someone unexpectedly re-enters her life.

What connects these stories isn't a dramatic plot twist, but the way ordinary encounters can disturb something we have kept neatly tucked away. A familiar melody, an old friendship, a conversation, a chance meeting, small things, but sometimes enough to make us look at our lives differently.

I also loved how the book moves between different ages and experiences without making any one of them feel more important than the other. First love, growing up, regret, responsibility, creative frustration and the uncertainty of what comes next all find their place here. The story seemed to ask you to slow down and pay attention to the quieter changes happening in people's lives.

More Days at the Torunka Cafe is gentle without being weightless, and cosy without being simply “cosy.” It is the kind of book where very little seems to happen on the surface, yet by the end, you have quietly become invested in the lives of people you met only a few pages ago.

I finished it with the feeling that I had spent an afternoon somewhere I would quite happily return to, perhaps for another coffee, another story, and a little more time with the people at Torunka. ...more "

Sep 01, 2026 11:34PM · see review

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