[1] Describing the unexpected ease with which he wrote The Lives of Others, he said of the process:[2] "Writers rarely have access to that part of their heads where books originate.

One can talk cogently of influences, plotting, putting a book together, structuring, editing, everything, really, but origins are a far cloudier issue, the domain of the unconscious, mostly, so not readily available for truthful discussion....

I don't know whether my book started life as the story of a joint family in Calcutta at a critical juncture in history or as a reckoning with an ultra-left movement for social justice and equality around which the domestic story was built.... That way of talking about a book as which narrative came first is always already too late because the origins lie far earlier....

Neel Mukherjee’s Choice is a collection of three novellas, loosely linked in terms of characters and events, but much more connected by themes.

Structured as a triptych, the narrative interweaves three distinct stories that collectively examine how personal decisions are influenced by broader economic and social forces.