This book was chosen as Karuna's Kitab Club's August book. I have not read the author's Leila so I got into the book completely neutral. 

Two protagonist POVs form the story. Mayank Tyagi, who works for a YouTube channel run by a right wing conservative Kashyap and Nisha Bisht, who has come to Delhi from a small town to fulfil her ambitions. You might assume it's a love story but fortunately for me Prayaag Akbar steers clear of that cliche as an immediate premise. 

The book takes a look at contemporary India with its digitization, fake news apparatus, jingoism, migrant issues, religious animosity, violence, drug and alcohol problems, journalistic ethics, climate change, poverty and rampant corruption. In that the book attempts to navigate a lot of issues for its size. By the middle of the book I was wondering how would the author tie all the threads in such few pages. Incredibly, the author manages to take care of a lot of them, except a few, and I really hope the author writes a sequel to this. Not just the love story, but also the development of the protagonists' arcs seems incomplete for now. I'd also want a few of the characters in the book suffer consequences for their choices. 

Writing-wise, Prayaag uses lucid, well constructed sentence structures. A couple places feel slightly rambly but that could be on me because I was invested in the plot and couldn't wait for things to move on. Like Karuna said on the group, it does feel because the book is short, we might have skimmed over a couple significant things. It's on me now to re-read a few pages again. 

That said, I truly think a sequel is warranted. And going by this book, I might just pick up Leila now.