Happy Birthday & other Short Stories

Meghna Pant’s “Happy Birthday”

The success of Meghna Pant’s debut novel, “One and a Half Wife”, increased the expectations of both readers and critics from her. The award winning author, Meghna Pant’s second book titled, “Happy Birthday” is published by Random House Publications.

After Dubai and Delhi, she is currently residing in Mumbai. She was much appreciated after the release of her first novel and won the Muse India’s Young Writer Award. Not only this, but the novel was also long listed for the Cinnamon Press Novel Writing Award; it made it to the top ten in Word Hustler’s Literary Storm Novel Contest too, and also reached the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, adding more feathers to the cap.

Her second book however, is a short story book and not a novel. The book, “Happy Birthday” is a collection of thirteen stories depicting different facets. The subjects are vivid which range from a woman married in money, yet unhappy with her life, to the Mumbai-slum girl who wants to say words which are valuable enough to be translated in English.

All the thirteen stories are heart-warming, introspecting, emotional stories which are eye-openers. When I ordered the book, the name suggested that these would be happy stories but they were realities of life, realities we often run away from, realities we close our eyes to. Even the cover of this book is beautiful at the first glance but if you look at it very carefully, you will realize that the balloons have something printed on them, and these are all related to something or the other in the stories.

Happy Birthday is gathering praises from every corner of the publishing world. Some of the most celebrated authors have appreciated the book and the online community has followed suit. In the official review by Flipkart, they said, “When you read a collection of short stories, you expect it to be wide-ranged and almost close to perfect. The writer for one cannot hide behind layers of plot, as sometimes in a story there is just one layer. At the same time, it isn’t easy for a writer to move from a novel to writing short stories for the second book. Meghna Pant achieves this to some extent in her new book, Happy Birthday and Other Stories.”

Meghna Pant by profession is a TV anchor and also a finance journalist. She has recently quit her job to become a full time writer, listening to her passion. She is currently working on her third book is titled ‘Sons Of God’.