India, Feb. 25 -- In Rupleena Bose's Summer of Then, we follow an unnamed protagonist as she grapples with feelings of loneliness and inadequacy as she contemplates her relationships with cities and the men she loves. The narrator, an ad hoc professor at Delhi University, marries her boyfriend, Nikhil, though she is full of doubts. She marries into a different class and caste and is afraid of the consequences. She refuses to be tamed. She knows her husband would have been better off with another woman, a simpler woman, as she says, one without hollow cracks. "A good mother probably makes a better wife," Bose writes, "I was not sure I could be either. One had to be consumed in the person. Consumed to the point of forgetting oneself, playin...