Title: Visitors to the House
Author: Shashank Gupta
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Harper Collins India 
Cost: Rs 499

Shashank Gupta’s debut novel, Visitors to the House, is an endearing collection of tales about five strangers who enter a cottage in the hill town of Didoli and develop interesting relationships with the family inhabiting it. The book is divided into five sections. Each of those is narrated through the perspective of  a different member of the family — the son, his step/sister, the step/mother, the father, and a girl named Theresa with a traumatic past.

What’s enjoyable about picking up Gupta’s novel is that it is a sweet reminder of innocence. It is filled with stories of kids and their journey growing up as they navigate the world around them. The third tale, in particular, is a beautiful narrative told by the stepmother, Mini, who encounters a girl with green eyes and golden hair swinging on her gate one day. The story introduces Mini’s grief from having lost a child who was only a few months old. After getting to know what the girl, whom she calls Kadu, had experienced, she begins to take care of her and finds,  in this process, a way to deal with her own loss and the emptiness that she’s carried all this while.