Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Solitude by Shubham Jain

It starts like a film with the sound turned low — a ceiling fan humming, rain smudging a window, someone breathing too carefully in the dark. That’s how Solitude opens — not with a scream, but with the kind of silence that makes your skin remember things you’ve tried to forget.

I didn’t pick this book to be scared. I picked it because the title felt eerily familiar. Solitude. That tender, terrifying word. The one that sometimes heals, sometimes destroys. And Shubham Jain, in his haunting debut, knows exactly how to make that word breathe, shiver, and ache on the page.

Before turning writer full-time, Shubham spent years crafting stories for brands. You can feel that precision here — every sentence measured, yet alive with pulse. He’s a Delhi boy who seems to have seen enough faces, heard enough silences, and gathered enough untold stories to realize that true horror doesn’t need monsters; it lives quietly in ordinary people who’ve been left alone too long.

Solitude brings together four of them — Sudha, Asad, Avantika, and Rohan — strangers linked by the thin, trembling thread of loneliness. The book doesn’t rush you. It lures you gently, like a dimly lit corridor where every step echoes a little too loudly. In Sudha’s story, the air feels heavy with things unsaid — the sound of a…