The Perfect Summer Read

About the book

A twenty-six-year-old English literature PhD student negotiates between her writing and her livelihood, her morality and her heart, her self-hood and her family’s history. Working odd jobs as a proofreader and researcher, she strays along a classically directionless path, finding herself in a stultified marriage and a similarly immobile but romantic adulterous relationship with her husband’s best friend.

Summer of Then is a debut novel that relishes the interiority of women, especially about the often-unsettling intimacies of relationships—sexual, romantic and platonic—against the trauma of sexual assault and harassment. Set across Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, and even Edinburgh, Scotland, this coming-of-age novel crosses paths with the India of the 2010s, exploring the trickle-down effect of politics into academia and college life in Indian metropolitan cities, leading us just to the point of the incipient anxieties and beginnings of the 2020 pandemic. In the vein of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, the novel’s protagonist has a sparse, yet deeply compelling voice that pays attention to precise emotional and social detail, exposing a range of motion between observational commentary and introspection.

About the author

Rupleena Bose teaches English literature at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi as a permanent faculty. She has a doctorate in literature focusing on music studies. She has written a non-fiction film, You Don’t Belong, which won a National Film Award in 2012.
She has been a Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship Holder (2012) at the University of Edinburgh for creative writing. She is also an occasional actor and has co-written a non-fiction book on the history of film festivals titled In the Life of a Film Festival (HarperCollins, 2018).
Her non-fiction directorial film Humour Black is a docu-fiction exploring satire, art and absurdity made under a Public Service Broadcasting Trust Film Fellowship. She also writes on cinema for The Hindu, The Hindu Blink, Firstpost, Economic and Political Weekly, Open, Biblio, ThePrint and others.