I don't live in a grand house with the kind of home library you see in magazines and movies. Every part of my home seems like a good place to read a book—a comfortable chair by the window, a side table with a cup of tea, the couch in the living room or even my bed just before I fall asleep. Looking back over the decades, I have realised that it isn't the furniture or floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that matter. It's the simple and delightful habit of settling down with a book,

I can never guess the culprit in Agatha Christie novels until Hercule Poirot lays it all out at the end. Likewise, I didn’t see the twists coming in The Silent Patient (2019), even if at times they might have seemed obvious. Just not to me. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention; so absorbed was I in this cleverly crafted psychological thriller. Alex Michaelides’ debut novel, to use a cliché, pulls you in from the start with an unsettling theme: thirty-three-year-old Alicia Berenson

Not everything that happens in a year is breaking news or makes headlines. That doesn’t make these other stories less interesting. They just go unnoticed if we aren’t paying attention. 2025 had plenty of the second kind—nothing newsy or heavy, just moments that didn’t trend for long, but somehow felt good, relevant and insightful. These are some of the uplifting global news stories from 2025 that you may have missed—stories that remind us that good things are still happenin

Whenever I’m out and about in Mumbai, or travelling to another city, I instinctively look for a bookstore first. It doesn’t matter whether it’s new, secondhand or a thrift store as long as it’s a place that sells books, where I can spend a couple of hours browsing and buying. Books, and especially comic-books, bring me joy. Sometimes, these literary excursions make me want to own a bookstore. But that doesn’t stop me from exploring other people’s bookshops. Luckily, Mumbai