Confessed picky reader that I am, Anisha Lalvani’s Girls Who Stray hooked me first by its title, and then the psychedelic cover, which shows a woman’s face dissolving into colour. The book, from the get-go, promised mystery and delivered it from the first unnumbered page. Those fragmented chapters initially read like scattered thoughts, but gradually, a picture started forming.

Though set in the 21st century, Girls Who Stray traps its protagonist in a world of deliberate mundanity. The early chapters’ attention to sensory detail evokes the descriptive awareness of Ruskin Bond and Pankaj Mishra. Consider this passage: “Today as well, I take it all in—the women in their pallus and bangles, boys in acid-washed jeans, children sucking jellied lollipops. The Wah ji Wah Restaurant in slumber now; it will blink alive tonight, blasting Haryanvi pop from the speakers.” At times, however, these observations overwhelm the novel’s circular structure, as protagonist continues to orbit a centre that will not hold.

She travels abroad but circles back to a future that hangs on the whims of a man who treats certainty as a concept he would  rather not engage with. Gradually, we begin picking up signs that things are going to go to hell, and that  is when the novel becomes genuinely gripping.

It is a story about loneliness, a woman’s quest for a meaningful life, the choices one is saddled with—the protagonist’s degree come to mind—and how women remain subject to patriarchy, the founding principle of most societies since the dawn of time. Women may have become empowered, but the modern painfully chaffs against the traditional, and so societies struggle to fully integrate the new-age liberated woman in its folds.

The protagonist wants to escape the patriarchy, and we alongside her embark on a journey towards liberation, but frustratingly, find ourselves in situations that reinforce it, and surrounded by people who uphold it.

There is nobody to look after our protagonist. Her parents are absentees, her as freshly divorced father rarely questions her absences, and her mother has never been actually present in her life. Predictably, she falls for a wealthy and selfish property developer, who is perpetually cold and aloof. And, once again, much as the case when she was in her father’s care, she is dependent on a man who will not even talk to her. The novel thus becomes an aching study of a woman treading a feminist path while stuck inside a patriarchal setup.

Two questions arise: does silence from men function as a subtle assertion of power? And does the same silence from women become, conversely, a survival strategy?

Female rage has long been dismissed within patriarchy as excessive or irrational. That the protagonist remains unnamed until the very end strips her of agency, confirming that she is, finally, both participant and consumer of a spectacle she cannot see.

Pop culture overload being what it is, comparisons are unavoidable. Anora, which won at the 2025 Oscars, shares something with this novel’s protagonist. Both are left adrift, though one arrives at self-realisation while the other remains stuck in the same loop.

Striking, too, is the near-total absence of friendship in the protagonist’s life. It is only much later that she decides to meet them, who are “…my friends, who are all here, so full of life.” There is a gap between the desired and actual social connection, which seems to be source of her perennial loneliness.

For a woman in her early 20s, one can empathise that it is hard to accept that no close relationships exist beyond the one man she obsesses over. All her time goes into researching someone whose online presence is deliberately opaque, which is what draws her in.

Lalvani defines the woman in many ways, while she is caught up in the loop of a self-depreciating cycle of thinking. She writes:  “This privilege, a young woman roaming because she can, because she has the money to- leftover from Sainsbury’s so long ago, leftover from whoring, I remind myself, but nobody has to know this. A woman on the loose.”

Lalvani returns repeatedly to the woman’s self-deprecating thought loops. She writes: “This privilege, a young woman roaming because she can, because she has the money to- leftover from Sainsbury’s so long ago, leftover from whoring, I remind myself, but nobody has to know this. A woman on the loose.”

The depiction of a free woman is still food for thought for many of us. A woman is free to make her choices, and yet the novel shows how easily that freedom collapses into dependence when external validation becomes the only measure of worth. Does patriarchy win at the end of a modern novel? The cards dealt to our unnamed protagonist suggest it might.

Girls Who Stray by Anisha Lalvani
Bloomsbury
₹699 (hardback)
296 pages