Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father – By Mohua Chinappa (Published by Rupa Publications India)

Step into an achingly beautiful, unfiltered landscape of familial love, grief, and emotional reckoning. Published by Rupa Publications India, Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father by acclaimed podcaster, writer, and voice artist Mohua Chinappa (Manu) is a searingly honest, poignant, and deeply intimate memoir written in epistolary form—a collection of letters sent across the veil of death to a father who has passed away.

The narrative is sparked by a crisis: her father’s sudden kidney failure. This medical emergency forces a daughter to pull back the layers of her past and confront the silent demons within—the sudden loss, the lingering self-doubts, the vast emptiness, the heavy guilt of things said in anger, and the agonizing angst of everything left unsaid. Through these letters, Mohua gathers unspoken thoughts, unshared memories, and buried words to unpack a complex relationship that was filled with immense joy, but balanced by equal moments of profound sorrow.

Mohua loved her Baba fiercely, yet she refuses to romanticize him. Instead, she paints a raw, multi-dimensional portrait of a man who was as genuinely kind as he was inadvertently cruel, as profoundly well-read as he was completely unworldly, and as deeply loved by his family as he felt unloved by the world.

The prose reads like a sensory, nostalgic map of an Indian childhood and adulthood, shifting between vividly captured landscapes: