An urban housewife looking for a suitable cook, a thieving maid, a bride-to-be planning her marriage, an adulterous husband, a woman whose talent has been buried and a marginalized family affected by the lockdown during a pandemic…
Some heartwarming and others heartbreaking, Richa’s stories in Slices of Life will make you laugh and cry, hope and yearn and seek justice.
Richa Gupta’s Slices of Life is a collection of stories on women from various walks of life set in the current chaotic times ranging from grim Realism (‘Disclosure’,‘Theft’ and ‘Dusk’) to futuristic Sci-fi where lovers meet with screens between them (‘Future Love Story’) and a suspenseful Whodunit (‘Knots’) to bathos (‘The Young Visitor’).
Slices of Life (Hesten) consists of vignettes of life in motion that provide an immersive and entertaining experience of diverse scenarios. They are slivers of existence with the ingredients of plot and character, sprinkled with human emotion, spiced by human dilemmas and served in the platter of language.
Sometimes searing with agony and often pervaded with beauty and yearning in the midst of travails in a contemporary or futuristic reality, they explore relationships and the human struggle to find meaning amidst chaos. They describe the consequences of our choices and characters who are at the threshold of a discovery or have reached the zenith of tolerance.
The universal themes depicted in the compendium leave us with enduring images of commonplace individuals in the swirl of life, for example, an urban housewife’s hilarious search for a suitable cook, a lover’s yearning in a dystopian world, a mother’s defense of her daughter’s idealism and a to-be-bride’s planning of her bridal couture. These portraitures have been embedded in a mixed bag of genres ranging from bathos and futuristic Sci-Fi to grim Realistic fiction and a suspenseful Whodunit.
More on the Author
After an academic and professional career, Richa Gupta has devoted herself to writing and published her second novel ‘Skeins’ in 2018. A senior teaching professional with over 19 years of academic teaching experience, Richa is also an Instructional Designer for training and e-learning in the corporate sector. She lives in New Delhi.
