Here I am, living my life looking at the rear-view mirror, driving to the end of the beginning of where I started.

My body still hurts.

It has been some time since Oorja Chaturvedi has come home; but the wounds she suffered, at the hands of the very people who so aptly named her, cut deep. Her relationship with her father was barely strung together with a few words. But when her mother dies, the woman whose nagging love was both her comfort and her secret hiding place from the world, new grief melds with old bitterness.

Reeling from the loss, Oorja decides to come back to India, only to find her estranged father missing. Her search leads her to her grandfather, a man who had lived all his life among books and forest, withering away in his house. As she tries to grapple with her grief for a dying grandfather, she unexpectedly finds love and solace in the arms of a man who inherits her grandfather’s estate. But before she can decide what Anang and her own future together hold, Oorja must first untangle the secrets of their shared past.

A quiet gut-punch of a debut, acclaimed filmmaker Ashwini Iyer Tiwary’s novel, Mapping Love is heartbreakingly brave and equally delicate. It is a story that digs its claws into you and doesn’t let go, long after you’ve finished it.