The Reading List

Mukesh Patel is a familiar literary type: the elderly, misunderstood misanthrope that everyone leaves alone. At the start of the book, he is content to nurse his grief over his wife Naina’s death, unable and unwilling to bond with his loving daughters or the community of Wembley. A first-generation Kenyan immigrant, Mukesh has long understood a life of being set apart—Naina was his sole consolation. Mukesh spent 50 years as a ticket agent for a rail system; now retired, he spends his days going to the mandir, shopping, and keeping to himself. Two years after Naina’s death, Mukesh has collapsed into exactly the kind of life his energetic and passionate wife feared he would choose: a solitary life of quiet routine.

Naina’s battle with cancer takes a great toll on Mukesh. He struggles with how quickly it devastated her, and he fails to slot cancer’s illogical modus operandi into his understanding of the world. Cancer upends the beauty and grace of Mukesh’s sense of nature, which he gleans from his beloved David Attenborough documentaries. At the start of the book, Mukesh is not a reader, especially not of fiction. But in an attempt to connect with his late wife, Mukesh picks up the last book Naina read before her death and discovers