There is a particular kind of literary fiction that does not announce itself. It builds slowly, voice by voice, until the reader realises they have been standing inside someone else’s inner life for a hundred pages without quite noticing the door close behind them. Strange Affections, the debut novel by Dubai-based writer Prannay Jha, is that kind of book.
Set for release on October 1, 2026 under Subtlewords Press, Strange Affections is a mosaic novel of roughly 42,000 words, told across five distinct narrators. It arrives after thirteen years of development, several rounds of traditional submission, and a final decision to self-publish on Prannay Jha’s own terms.
What Strange Affections Is About
At the centre of the novel is Aadrian Peralta, a man of near-total emotional inaccessibility who has spent his life engineering passion in other people as a substitute for feeling it himself. Opposite him is Rose Ohen, a refugee artist who stopped painting the moment she finally reached safety, as though safety itself had taken the work away from her.
Their story unfolds across Northern Italy, France, and an unnamed village in the Black Forest, and closes at a Grand Palais exhibition staged under a dead man’s name. There is no India setting and no diaspora framing here. The novel asks to be read simply as a literary novel, not as an Indian novel, which is a deliberate and fairly unusual choice for a debut author writing from Dubai with Indian roots.
Why the Five-Voice Structure Matters
Most commercial fiction picks a single point of view and holds it. Strange Affections does the harder thing. The book moves between five voices, The Mother, Mousse, Aadrian, Rose’s Mother, and the Diary of Rose, each with its own punctuation logic built directly into the prose. Aadrian’s sections carry the book’s only em dashes. Mousse speaks in ellipses. No section uses a colon.
This is not a stylistic flourish added late. It is a structural decision that runs through the entire manuscript, and it is the kind of formal commitment that readers of serious literary fiction tend to notice and reward, even when they cannot immediately name why a chapter feels like a particular person and not just a particular plot.
A Debut Shaped by Thirteen Years and a Traditional Publishing Run
Before it became a self-published title, Strange Affections went through a genuine traditional publishing process. The manuscript was submitted through Penguin Random House India, read in full by an agent, and reached the desk of PRH’s Executive Editor and Foreign Rights Lead before ultimately being passed on, described as an intriguing, well-written concept that did not align with the list at the time.
Rather than shelve the book or chase a narrower commercial shape for it, Prannay Jha chose to self-publish through his own imprint, Subtlewords Press. That decision preserved the novel’s structure, its European setting, and its refusal to soften Aadrian into a more conventional romantic lead. For readers who follow independent literary fiction, this is often where the more interesting books end up anyway, outside the list a large publisher was building that season.
Where Strange Affections Sits Among Comparable Authors
Readers drawn to Kazuo Ishiguro’s emotional withholding, Donna Tartt’s slow-burn structure, Patricia Highsmith’s discomfort, or John Fowles’ obsession with control and performance will recognise the territory Strange Affections is working in. It also sits comfortably alongside more recent literary fiction such as Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, books built on fractured perspective and interior pressure rather than conventional plot momentum.
This is a novel written for readers who choose literary fiction specifically because they want prose that asks something of them, not a book that happens to be well written on the way to somewhere else.
Publication Details
Strange Affections releases on October 23, 2026 as both an ebook and paperback through Kindle Direct Publishing, with a limited print run also distributed in India and the UAE. It is published under Subtlewords Press, the imprint Prannay Jha founded specifically for this book.
Readers who want to follow the release, including early excerpts and the story behind the novel’s thirteen-year path to publication, can find updates on the Subtlewords Press website and Prannay Jha’s author channels in the coming weeks.
Strange Affections is not trying to be an easy read, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is a patient, formally disciplined piece of literary fiction about a man who cannot feel and the people who absorb the cost of that. For readers who have been waiting for something that treats voice and structure as seriously as story, this is a debut worth watching for on October 1, 2026.
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