Letters That Never Crossed Nainital vs. P.S. I Love You
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If you searched your way to this post, there's a good chance you just finished P.S. I Love You or rewatched the film and typed some version of "books like P.S. I Love You" into Google, looking for something that will hit the same way. That instinct makes sense because I myself did that. Few narrative devices carry as much emotional weight as a letter someone else was never supposed to read yet.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital by Yash Gadade that is me, shares that exact bone structure with Cecelia Ahern's beloved novel; a story built entirely out of letters, where the writing itself becomes the plot. But the two books get there from almost opposite emotional starting points, and if you're deciding whether to pick one up next, that difference is worth understanding before you do.
The premise: Grief looking forward vs. Love looking for a way through
P.S. I Love You begins after loss. Holly is grieving her husband Gerry, who has left behind a series of letters to be opened one by one, guiding her gently back toward living. The letters are retrospective, written by someone who already knows how the story ends, trying to help the person left behind find her way through what comes next.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital begins from the opposite direction. Aarav and Meera are writing to each other in real time, in the middle of falling in love, with no idea what will happen next; until a flood in Uttarakhand disrupts the very system carrying their words to each other. Decades later, a present-day post office worker named Jay discovers the undelivered bundle and has to piece together, letter by letter, what actually happened between two people who never got to find out if the other received their words at all.
Put simply: P.S. I Love You is about letters written knowing the ending. Letters That Never Crossed Nainital is about letters written with absolutely no idea how the story turns out including, for most of the book, the reader.
The letters themselves: instruction vs. uncertainty
Gerry's letters in P.S. I Love You function almost like a gentle set of instructions, each one nudging Holly toward a specific next step in her healing, revealed on a schedule he planned before he died. There's control in them, tenderness shaped by hindsight.
Aarav and Meera's letters have none of that certainty. They're written without a plan, responding to whatever the other person's last letter said, genuinely unsure if the next one will even arrive. That uncertainty produces a very different kind of intimacy, smaller, more tentative, built one honest line at a time. One rejected letter captures it well, after a missed meeting neither of them could control:
It's not an instruction, like Gerry's letters. It's a decision made without knowing if it will ever be tested which is really the entire emotional register of this book, in eight words.
The narrator problem: Holly reads for herself, Jay reads for us
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One structural difference matters more than it might seem: in P.S. I Love You, Holly is both the letter-reader and the protagonist, we experience her grief and her letters together, in real time.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital splits that role. Jay, the present-day post office worker who finds the undelivered letters, isn't part of Aarav and Meera's story at all; he's a reader, exactly like you. His hesitation before opening each envelope, his growing sense of responsibility for a stranger's unfinished love story, mirrors the reader's own experience of the book far more directly than Holly's first-person grief does. If you've ever felt like you were "given" a story you had no right to, but couldn't stop reading anyway, Jay is written for you specifically.
Tone: healing vs. waiting
P.S. I Love You is, underneath the grief, fundamentally about moving forward each letter is a small push toward a future Gerry won't be part of. It's warm, wise, occasionally very funny in the way British and Irish grief-lit often allows itself to be, and it ends with Holly having grown into someone new.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital sits in a different emotional register entirely: waiting, not moving forward. Most of its tension comes from delay, a letter that hasn't arrived yet, a meeting that might not happen, a flood that stops everything for good. It's quieter and more atmospheric than propulsive, more interested in what patience costs a person than in what growth looks like afterward.
Which one should you read next?
Read (or reread) P.S. I Love You if: you want warmth after loss, a protagonist actively rebuilding her life, and an ending that resolves cleanly into hope.
Read Letters That Never Crossed Nainital if: you want something slower and more uncertain — a love story that trusts silence and distance as much as it trusts declarations, told through a present-day narrator who's discovering the story exactly as you are, one undelivered letter at a time.
Honestly, if you loved P.S. I Love You for the letters and not specifically for the grief arc, Letters That Never Crossed Nainital might actually hit harder — it's built almost entirely out of the tension Ahern's book resolves in its first act: not knowing if your words are even reaching the person you love.
📖 Get Letters That Never Crossed Nainital on Goodreads →
If you want to go deeper on the book before deciding, here's a full breakdown of the Nainital lake chapter, or the real story behind why I wrote it.
FAQs
Is Letters That Never Crossed Nainital similar to P.S. I Love You?
Both novels are told entirely through letters and center on a love story shaped by loss and distance. The key difference: P.S. I Love You follows letters written with the ending already known, guiding a grieving widow forward, while Letters That Never Crossed Nainital follows letters written in real time, with neither the characters nor the reader knowing how the story ends.
What genre is Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
It's a literary/contemporary epistolary romance with a dual-timeline structure — a 1970s love story between Aarav and Meera, uncovered decades later by Jay, a present-day post office worker.
Who should read Letters That Never Crossed Nainital if they loved P.S. I Love You?
Readers who were drawn specifically to the letter format and the slow emotional unspooling of P.S. I Love You, rather than its grief-recovery arc, are likely to connect with this book's quieter, more uncertain take on the same structure.
Are there other epistolary romance novels similar to both books?
Yes — the epistolary romance genre includes a range of tones, from Ahern's warmth to more atmospheric, slow-burn takes like Letters That Never Crossed Nainital. If you enjoy stories told through letters, both are strong entry points into the genre.
Where can I read or buy Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
It's available as an ebook. You can also add it on Goodreads to help other readers discover it.
Read both? I'd genuinely love to know which letter-writer stayed with you longer — Gerry, or Aarav. Drop it in the comments.
