Kathmandu, May 4 -- Pro tip: This novel is best read with sad, sentimental music wafting out of the stereo. This will brings out true pathos, and create a ready path for all your traumatic memories to come tumbling out. In that regard, Dark Circles, the debut of author Udayan Mukherjee, is synonymous with a feeling of eternal sadness and doom, the cause of which you cannot identify.

The novel starts with death by cancer and progresses (or regresses) to alcoholism, mental illness, suicide, adultery, and existential angst--not necessarily in that order, but each incident and revelation more discomfiting than the one before. As its protagonist, Ronojoy, says, "Everything is topsy-turvy, nothing regular."

Ronojoy and his brother, Sujoy, hav...