Short Fiction · Amazon · 2023

Threads of Longings, Shadows of Loss

Tales Inspired by True Lives

Dr. Vandana Sharma Amazon, 2023 Paperback & Kindle

Five powerful short stories inspired by the real lives of late 20th-century India — a tapestry of love, longing, betrayal, and endurance, rendered with scholarly precision and deep human empathy.

Each story in this collection illuminates the hidden interior lives of people navigating extraordinary circumstances with quiet dignity. Together they form a portrait of an India rarely seen in literary fiction — the India of private lives, of women who endure, of men who fail and sometimes redeem themselves, of children who absorb what adults cannot name.

Dr. Sharma draws on decades of literary scholarship and a lifetime of attentive observation to render these lives with both analytical clarity and lyrical warmth. The result is fiction that feels documentary in its authenticity and deeply human in its compassion.

The Five Stories

The Weight of Silence

A woman navigates the aftermath of a marriage that never spoke its truths aloud — a study in what endurance looks like when it has no language for itself.

The River Between

Two siblings separated by circumstance find their reunion complicated by the distance that time and different lives have placed between them.

III

Letters Never Sent

An epistolary story of longing — correspondence drafted but never posted, tracing the contours of a love that had no permission to exist.

The Landlady's Daughter

A quietly devastating portrait of a young woman whose ambitions are systematically absorbed by the needs of everyone around her — and of one moment in which she refuses.

A Thread of Gold

The final story reaches toward hope — a widow in the last years of her life discovering, with surprise, that she is not finished yet.

Five Lives

Inspired by true events. Rendered with compassion. These are stories that linger.

A Note on the Stories

These five stories are works of fiction — but they are grounded in observation, in the lives of real people Dr. Sharma encountered across her years as a professor, a woman, a daughter, a neighbour. The names and circumstances have been changed; the emotional truth has not.

Each story began as a face — someone glimpsed across a faculty room, someone mentioned in passing, someone whose life lodged in the imagination and refused to leave. Threads of Longings is the result of that refusal.

These are stories that honour the resilience of those whose voices might otherwise have remained unheard — lives made vivid through the act of imagining them whole.

— Dr. Vandana Sharma, Author's Note

About the Author

Dr. Vandana Sharma

Author · Scholar · Storyteller

Dr. Vandana Sharma holds a Ph.D. in Anglo-Indian literature from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. She spent over thirty years as a professor of English literature before retiring to write full-time.

Her other published works include the memoir Veiled Horizons and the three-volume academic series Cultural Cross Currents.

Full Biography

Also by Dr. Vandana Sharma

Veiled Horizons Memoir · 2024 Explore →

I–III

Cultural Cross Currents Academic Trilogy View on Amazon →