The Unsaid

He noticed everything. He said nothing. It cost him twenty years.

Shimla, 2003. In a school where the boys and girls sit in separate rows and nobody says anything out loud, Kabir Sharma has one talent, and it is useless. He can tell you who is unhappy at home, who islying about a test, which teacher hasn't read the chapter.

Then a girl walks in late out of the rain, and the whole room turnsto look.

For the next eight years he will fetch, and fix, and wait - and neveronce say the word. He will rebuild his entire self so that she mightlook at him properly. He will be the boy who always does.

THE UNSAID is a story about first love and its long shadow. About the families who say everything in food and nothing out loud. About the friend who tries to warn you and gets it wrong, or right, and neverfinds out which. And about the person standing quietly in the corner of your life, waiting years for you to notice.

He is a grown man before he understands what silence has cost him. By then there is somebody else in the room.

A quiet, unsparing debut about small-town India, unrequited love, and the sentences we never manage to say.

For readers who have ever loved somebody and not said it.