People keep telling me my book reminds them of The Fault in Our Stars, and for a while I didn't fully understand why, the settings couldn't be more different, one's a contemporary American cancer ward and the other's a 1970s hill town post office in Uttarakhand. But the more I sat with it, the more I got what readers were actually responding to. It's not the plot. It's the shape underneath the plot which I came to know after watching the movie.
Both books are, at their core, about people who fall in love while something neither of them controls is quietly working against them the entire time. But the endings are opposites.
The obstacle: illness vs. distance
In The Fault in Our Stars, the obstacle is Hazel and Augustus's mortality, cancer sets a clock on their relationship from the very first page, and the book never lets you forget it, even in its funniest, lightest scenes. The tragedy isn't hidden behind the romance. It's built into the foundation of it. Even in the movie they meet at a cancer center.
In Letters That Never Crossed Nainital, the obstacle is distance, and later, a flood that disrupts the postal system carrying Aarav and Meera's letters to each other. Neither of them is dying. But for most of the book, neither of them, nor the reader, knows whether their words are even reaching the other person. It's a slower, quieter kind of dread than TFIOS's, but it comes from the same place: love, threatened by something entirely outside anyone's control.
The narrator problem, again
TFIOS is told entirely from Hazel's perspective, in real time, as things happen to her. You experience the fear and the love simultaneously, which is part of what makes it so overwhelming to read.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital splits that experience differently. Aarav and Meera's story is told through their own letters, but it's Jay, a present-day post office worker who finds the undelivered bundle decades later, who actually reads it all and processes it for us. We don't experience the uncertainty in real time the way Hazel's readers do. We experience it retrospectively, already knowing something went wrong somewhere, and slowly finding out what and how much.
What each book is actually asking
I think TFIOS's real question is: if you know your time with someone is limited, do you love them anyway, fully, knowing exactly what it'll cost you? Hazel spends a good portion of the book trying to protect Augustus from that cost before finally deciding the love is worth it regardless.
My book asks something adjacent but different: if you don't know whether your love is even reaching the person you're sending it to, do you keep sending it anyway? Aarav's answer, in the line most readers quote back to me, is about as direct as it gets:
He's not deciding to love Meera despite a guaranteed loss, the way Hazel and Augustus do. He's deciding to keep loving her despite total uncertainty about whether it'll ever be received at all. Different math, same core instinct, love as a choice you keep making without a guaranteed return.
The endings: earned grief vs. earned relief
Without spoiling either book for anyone who hasn't finished them: TFIOS ends the way it has to, given everything it's built with grief that the book has more than earned, refusing every opportunity to cheat its way to something easier. Green famously doesn't let his characters, or his readers, off the hook. Even the book's most quoted closing exchange between Hazel and Augustus; "Okay? Okay." — carries as much unresolved ache as it does tenderness.
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital ends differently, not because it's a lighter book, but because it's asking a different question. Decades after the flood, Aarav and Meera are shown together again, older, having found their way back to each other. The book doesn't dramatize how. It just shows you that, eventually, against every bureaucratic and circumstantial obstacle in its way, something crossed:
"It had taken fifty years. But it had crossed." - Quote from the book
If TFIOS is about the courage to love someone you're going to lose, mine is about the patience to keep loving someone you might never fully get back — and what happens on the rare occasion that patience turns out to be worth it.
📖 Get Letters That Never Crossed Nainital on Goodreads →
If you want the ending broken down properly, including the one thing I left deliberately unresolved, here's the full explanation. Or if you're still deciding what to read next after TFIOS, here's the full list this post is a spin-off of.
FAQs
Is Letters That Never Crossed Nainital similar to The Fault in Our Stars?
Both are love stories where an outside force neither character controls — illness in TFIOS, distance and a flood in Letters That Never Crossed Nainital — threatens the relationship throughout the book. The tone and setting differ significantly, but the emotional structure is closely related.
What is the main difference between the two books?
The Fault in Our Stars is told in real time from Hazel's first-person perspective. Letters That Never Crossed Nainital is told retrospectively through Aarav and Meera's letters, read decades later by Jay, a present-day post office worker piecing their story together.
Does Letters That Never Crossed Nainital have a sad ending like The Fault in Our Stars?
No — without full spoilers, the book ultimately resolves with Aarav and Meera reunited decades later. The tension throughout the book comes from uncertainty rather than an inevitable loss.
What is Letters That Never Crossed Nainital about?
It's a debut epistolary novel about Aarav and Meera, two lovers whose letters were meant to cross the hills of Nainital and never fully did, and Jay, a present-day post office worker who discovers their undelivered letters decades later.
Where can I read Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
It's available as an ebook. You can also add it on Goodreads to help other readers discover it.
Which question hits closer to home for you — loving someone you know you'll lose, or loving someone you're not sure is even hearing you? I think about this more than I probably should. Tell me your answer in the comments.
