New Delhi, June 21 -- In an age of relentless acceleration, contemporary fiction increasingly appears anxious about stillness. Many novels today arrive carrying the burden of urgency - geopolitical catastrophe, generational trauma, identity fragmentation, technological alienation, or moral collapse. Characters speak in heightened registers of self-awareness, while plots move with algorithmic efficiency and emotional lives are translated into declarations, diagnoses and dramatic ruptures. Within South Asian literary spaces too, there is understandable pressure for fiction to perform relevance loudly - to explain societies, decode crises, or embody cultural anxieties at scale.

Against this landscape, Sonia Bahl's Eighteen Inches Apart (Fin...