Breakaway Books

Authored by Parini Shroff; Published July 2026; Fiction

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Some People surprised me. For a novel that I thought would bore me—you may know I normally don’t love novels in which little happens—it captured me fully. 

In Some People, Nathan is in the process of getting divorced from Kavya, who has absconded to India for a degree in history, when Kavya’s mother Malti suffers a serious fall. Without anyone else to help, Malti is forced into the unenviable position of allowing her soon-to-be ex-son-in-law to move in with her and take care of her. Over the course of a week, they learn much more about each other than they did over the course of Nathan’s marriage, and a bridge starts to form between them.

You know what gives me hope? When two people start from a place of deep misunderstanding, prejudice, and mistrust and are able to work their way to connection. That’s what happens with Nathan and Malti in this book, through conflict and repair, over and over again throughout the week. As they talk about the big and little matters of marriage and parenting, it is encouraging to me how they challenge each other to understand how things look through the other person’s eyes. I wish that we had as much capacity as a society to be curious and flexible in our mindsets as these two demonstrate in the novel. The people who look like villains in their stories at the beginning gain depth and sympathy by the end. 

But what makes this novel work, really, is the humor. I don’t think I could have taken three hundred pages of nonstop empathizing, so the interludes of humor are both a relief and actually quite funny. A grumpy old immigrant woman who has the mouth of a sailor is somehow far more entertaining than she should be, especially with Nathan playing the straight man. The otherwise serious topics of sins passed down from mother to daughter and the difficulty of admitting vulnerability are far more easily swallowed when it’s followed up by Malti’s squawking about Nathan’s constipation issues, or a visit to the cat “brothel” (cafe). If there’s one issue that I had with this novel, it’s with Kavya, barely glimpsed throughout its pages, who seems a little melodramatic and over serious. But that’s about me not liking the character, not really the story itself.

Some People manages to give me hope for the human ability to connect while also making me laugh. That’s an uncommon feat.