Dates, debts, and dates

Some debts are financial. Some are emotional. The ones that haunt you most are the ones you never agreed to carry.

In eight unforgettable stories set in the cities of Bombay and Bangalore, Manik Bal brings together a cast of ordinary people navigating the weight of their choices. A musician who can't outrun the ghost of a first love. A young bride discovering the distance between the life she imagined and the one she's been handed. A man who hasn't visited his childhood neighborhood in decades - and the phone call that makes him reckon with why. A boy whose recklessness one night costs him everything.These are not dramatic lives. They are yours, your parents', your neighbors'. But in Bal's precise, empathetic hands, the familiar becomes quietly devastating - and quietly beautiful. Dates, Debts, and Dates is Book Five in the celebrated Odd Tales from Bombay and Bangalore series - and a collection that proves, once again, that the most extraordinary stories are hiding inside the most ordinary lives.

For readers of R.K. Narayan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Raymond Carver. For anyone who has ever asked: what do we owe the people we've left behind?