Preeti Shenoy’s fiction is a literary detox from the messiness of our lives. Her romance stories are grounded in recognisable emotions, but remain relatively uncomplicated. That is why her latest book, People We Love, reads like an undemanding romantic fiction meant to be savoured at leisure.
This time, Shenoy returns to characters and stories from her earlier works. The book brings together three interconnected stories that serve as prequels to The One You Cannot Have (2013) and It’s All in the Planets (2016). Yet each story can also be read independently, without prior knowledge of the books that it is connected with.
The first story, Before the Planets Aligned, follows Aniket, an introverted techie who secretly likes his colleague Trisha, a model whom he considers far beyond his reach. Encouraged by another colleague, Subramaniyan Venkataraman, he finally takes a chance and agrees to a secret date with her. What follows is a relationship that neither quite knows how to navigate. Elsewhere, Nidhi has left her corporate job to pursue her passion for pottery. When she attends the wedding of her college sweetheart, Vir, she is forced to confront the emptiness of her own relationship with Manoj. The two threads eventually converge when Nidhi and Aniket meet on a train, following the events of It’s All in the Planets.
In The One Who Changed Everything, Shenoy goes further back to explore Aman and Shruti’s relationship—the romance, resistance, complications, and eventual separation that precede The One You Cannot Have. The third, The One I Almost Missed, travels further back still, focusing on Anjali, a journalist who becomes romantically involved with Aman.
There is a leisurely quality to these stories, perhaps because Shenoy is deliberately returning to where her characters began. The romances unfold slowly, without the urgency or drama that often drives contemporary relationship fiction. That restraint is one of the book’s strengths.
Shenoy is also consistent in the way she draws her women. Trisha, Nidhi and Anjali are independent, headstrong and invested in lives beyond romance. Nidhi, for instance, leaves the corporate world to build Mitti, her pottery studio, which becomes a popular space for people seeking something beyond the finished product. As Shenoy writes, “For most who walk through Mitti’s doors, pottery isn’t about the final piece. Instead, it’s about the journey.” The passage captures a recurring idea in Shenoy’s fiction: that fulfilment can be found in work, passion and self-discovery as much as in relationships.
Her greatest strength remains her ease of storytelling. Shenoy understands the rhythms of contemporary urban relationships and writes with a lightness that keeps the narrative moving. There is also something reassuring about the continuity between her books: characters who once occupied the margins of earlier stories are now given their own histories and motivations.
But the decision to revisit stories rooted in the 2010s also raises questions. These are contemporary romances, yet they belong to a noticeably different technological and social moment. An example is Trisha breaking up with her fiancé over email—a detail that feels dated in an era of instant messaging and relationships conducted increasingly through phones. More broadly, the emotional landscape of romance has shifted considerably, with dating apps, fleeting connections, and more fluid ideas of commitment changing how relationships are understood.
Shenoy, however, is not trying to rewrite these stories for the present. By calling them prequels, she places them firmly in the past and allows them to retain the rhythms and assumptions of the worlds in which her earlier novels were conceived. The result is an uncomplicated, nostalgic return to a gentler kind of romantic fiction—one where love may be complicated, but the storytelling rarely is.