Book Title: House next to the factory.
Writer: Sonal Kohli
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Year: 2021
Reading Medium: Kindle
Rating: 4.8/5
The factory in the title appears to be a steel factory in Somewhere, India. It does not exactly lie at the centre of the collection the way one might expect, although it does make cameos in several stories. The house in question, which the collection opens with a description of, is a quiet, lonely thing. It has a neglected, forgotten aura about it even as a family lives there. The entire collection consists of stories about characters who are all linked to the family in the eponymous house in some or the other way.
Because they definitely are mostly fragments, which was an interesting, slightly unconventional choice. All of the characters feel like people you could know, or be. With the stories being so short, and so lacking in density, it’s not like we get to see rich explorations of each one’s inner lives. We just watch them for a moment, in one aspect of themselves, one story that they lived through.
The Bibliophilist 