Strange Affections Book Launches in India, 7 Essential Things Hidden in My Debut Novel

The Strange Affections book is now on sale in India. Paperback at a launch price of ₹299 against an MRP of ₹399, Kindle edition at ₹199, 208 pages, published under Subtlewords Press. It took 13 years to write and about six months to launch.

Here is the opinion the whole novel rests on. The most interesting person in a room is not the one feeling everything. It is the one feeling nothing and quietly arranging for everyone else to feel it instead.

That person is Aadrian Peralta, and this book is an attempt to sit inside his head for 42,000 words without once letting him off the hook.

What the Strange Affections book is about

A man of near total emotional inaccessibility engineers passion in other people as a substitute for feeling it himself. He is very good at it. The people around him mistake the engineering for love, and some of them do not survive the mistake.

The story moves across northern Italy, France, and an unnamed village at the edge of the Black Forest. It ends at an exhibition in the Grand Palais, staged under the name of a man who is already dead.

The Strange Affections book is literary fiction in the mosaic form. There is no detective, no twist on the last page, and no villain who explains himself. What there is instead is five people describing the same man and arriving at five different men.

If you want the shortest possible description, it is a book about the difference between being loved and being arranged.

Five narrators, and why none of them is him

The novel is told in five voices.

Four of the five are trying to explain him. He gets one section to explain himself and it is the least reliable one in the Strange Affections book.

That is deliberate. A man who manufactures feeling in others is the last person who can describe what he is doing. The reader has to assemble him out of what everyone else noticed.

The punctuation is the architecture

This is the part most readers will not notice consciously, and the part I spent the longest on.

Each narrator owns a mark. Aadrian owns the dash, and it appears nowhere else in the novel. Mousse owns the ellipsis, because he is a man who cannot finish a sentence or a thought. There are no colons anywhere in the Strange Affections book, not one, in 42,000 words.

The effect is that you can open the book at a random page and know who is speaking before you read a name. The voice is carried by the marks, not just the vocabulary.

Writers reading this, try it on your own manuscript. Assign one mark per narrator and then enforce it ruthlessly. It is harder than it sounds and it does more for voice than any amount of dialect.

There is no India in this book

An Indian author, a novel set in Italy, France and Germany, and not a single Indian character (well there is one for a brief time). I know how that reads, so let me say the uncomfortable part plainly.

I did not set it abroad to seem international. I set it there because the story needed a place where a man could vanish into a village and then reappear in Paris with a new name, and because the coldness of the Black Forest in winter does something to the prose that Gurgaon does not.

The risk is real. Indian readers often want Indian books, and the Strange Affections book gives them none of that comfort. Some of you will put it down for that reason alone.

What I will say in its defence is that emotional inaccessibility is not a European condition. Most Indian readers will recognise Aadrian within twenty pages, probably from their own family.

The two people at the centre

Aadrian Peralta. He cannot feel much, so he builds situations in which other people feel enormously, and then stands close enough to warm himself on it. He is not a sociopath and the book never calls him one. He is something more common and more frightening, which is a man who has learned that arranging love works almost as well as having it.

Rose Ohen. A refugee artist who painted all through the years she was in danger and stopped the moment she was finally safe. That is the sentence the whole novel grew out of. Safety took the thing that danger had been feeding.

They are not a love story. They are two people with the same injury pointing in opposite directions, and the Strange Affections book is what happens when those two meet.

The ending at the Grand Palais belongs to Rose, not to him. That is the only spoiler you get.

Thirteen years and one rejection that was right

The first draft was 2,000 words in 2013. A second was 3,600 words in 2015. It appeared as a 5,000 word short story in November 2016 and then refused to stay that size.

It went to Penguin Random House India through a former editor there, then to an agent, then to two editors inside the house, each of whom read a full manuscript. The answer was that the concept was intriguing and the writing strong, but it did not fit the current list.

I have read that email many times and I now think it was correct. The version they read dipped in the middle and Rose was thinner than she deserved to be. The Strange Affections book you can buy today is the one that fixed both.

The useful lesson for other writers is that a no from a good editor usually contains a diagnosis. Read it for the diagnosis, not for the verdict.

Why it is only 42,000 words

Most literary novels in Indian bookshops run 80,000 to 120,000 words. This one is 42,000, which puts it at 208 pages in a 5×8 inch format.

That is a commercial disadvantage and I knew it when I locked the length. A thin spine looks like less value on a shelf at ₹299.

I kept it short because the form demanded it. Five voices circling one man works at short range. Stretch the same structure to 100,000 words and the circling becomes repetition, which is exactly the note the manuscript got when it was longer.

You can read the Strange Affections book in two evenings. I would rather you finish it and think about it for a week than own 400 pages you abandon at page sixty.

Who should read it, and who should not

Read it if you liked Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators who cannot see themselves, Patricia Highsmith’s men who are charming and wrong, or Donna Tartt’s groups that close around a secret.

Skip it if you want plot acceleration, a redemption arc, or a protagonist to root for. Aadrian does not improve. The book is not interested in improving him.

[IMAGE, the paperback on a table with the shattered glass cover visible. Alt text, Strange Affections book paperback edition by Prannay Jha]

If you are unsure, read the first section. The Mother tells you within ten pages exactly what kind of attention this novel is going to ask of you.

Where to buy it in India

Both are launch prices. The paperback is ₹100 under the MRP printed on the back cover and the Kindle edition is at ₹199, and neither stays there once the launch window closes.

Outside India.

The book is published by Subtlewords Press, ISBN 978-81-903840-0-1. There is no distributor and no sales team behind it, which means the first hundred readers decide whether anyone else ever finds it.

So here is the next action, and it is a small one. Buy the Strange Affections book this week while the launch price holds, read it over two evenings, and leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads. Two stars written seriously is worth more to me than five stars written out of politeness.

If you would rather talk to me about it first, reply to this post. I answer every one. Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn

Also Read: Self-Publishing a Novel: My Painful but Fulfilling Journey of Getting 1000 Books

I did create a trailer for Strange Affections as well.