As the pandemic brings India to a halt, an elderly woman falls down in her home and hears her leg break. Next door, a young girl stuck indoors persuades her taciturn old neighbour to set up a book club. A few doors down, a wife contemplates the plans she once made with an ex-boyfriend as her husband grows distant. A young boy falls in love with a girl on the rooftop across. A market trader battles against being housebound until his cousin is felled by the virus. And a migrant labourer sets off on foot, heading back to his village as work dries up in the city.

Evocative, lyrical and uplifting, the interconnected stories in The New New Delhi Book Club reveal Radhika Swarup’s innate ability to paint a vivid portrait of a community and to find hope and joy even in the most trying of times.