Love in small-town and city India rarely announces itself. It borrows an umbrella. It saves a seat on the 9:15 bus. It learns to make coffee the way somebody's late wife used to make it.

Monsoon Hearts is a collection of fourteen original love stories set in the places where Indian life actually happens: a broken-down bus past Jangaon, a circulating library in Kothapet, a railway colony where the neighbours know everything eleven months early, a closing single-screen theatre in Malleshwaram, a terrace divided by a nineteen-year family war, a village jatara where a love story pauses for twenty years and then resumes.

Some stories end with a wedding, some with a goodbye, one or two with only a beginning. Like the real thing.

For readers who like their romance warm, funny, quietly moving, and unmistakably Indian.