The Reading List

by Sara Nisha Adams

She looked down the list, taking in one title at a time. She had read some of these already, including To Kill a Mockingbird, when she was a teenager. She didn’t remember the story, she was terrible with details, but she remembered the way it made her feel. It had this kind of warm, magical quality about it. The title brought memories of eating breakfast outside on a wooden bench—and it was so long ago she couldn’t recall whether the memory was her own or a scene from the book itself.

But it was 2019. The year Mukesh least hoped it would be. The second year of his life since Naina, the year that began without Naina and would end without Naina too. He opened his copy of Rebecca. Even though the book had scared him half to death, he needed to be somewhere else for a while, beyond the confines of his little Wembley home, walking in someone else’s skin.