Team Kitaab is in conversation with author Sonia Bahl about her latest book, Eighteen Inches Apart (Fingerprint! Publishing, 2026) where she talks about the story behind the story.
Sonia Bahl writes about the kinds of encounters contemporary life trains people to dismiss: a conversation with a stranger on a delayed flight, a fleeting exchange at a café, a face glimpsed briefly in a crowd that lingers inexplicably in memory long after more important relationships fade. Across her fiction, these moments become emotionally catalytic because they quietly alter the texture of how her characters move through the world.
In her latest novel, Eighteen Inches Apart, Bahl returns to this terrain with greater philosophical depth and formal assurance, tracing the invisible threads that connect strangers across cities, grief, memory and longing. Moving between Calcutta and London, the novel explores what it means to be emotionally seen in an age of hyperconnectivity, and whether intimacy may sometimes reside most powerfully in transient human recognition rather than permanence.