New Delhi, March 23 -- The title of Alina Gufran's debut novel, No Place to Call My Own, is a dead giveaway. In case you guessed it to be a story of alienation, identity crisis, and the search for an elusive "home" by a young and confused protagonist, you'd be spot on. To give credit to the writer, it does take chutzpah to venture into such a long-festering cliche of a theme, especially in a first book. A recent successful experiment with a similar subject was Devika Rege's imperfect but edgy debut novel, Quarterlife (2023), portraying the angst of a generation of Indians who came of age in a nation bristling with communal tension and unbridled capitalism.

odd pages of Gufran's novel that chronicle the misadventures of her protagonist So...