In the midst of reading Antara Ganguli’s new book, Tanya Tania, another novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, comes to mind. It’s not the story which stirs the recollection, but the epistolary nature of the two novels. How often do you find books that tell you entire stories, solely through a chain of letters? Thanks to the slowly vanishing craft, anything that preserves such a memory is welcome.

For 36-year-old Ganguli, it was her love for writing long letters as a teenager that helped define this novel. But, there was a larger, overriding picture that served as the backdrop for the book.