The Literary Mirror

Iyengar's debut follows four employees of a Gurugram call centre across one financial quarter, and resists the two plots this setting usually gets handed — the burnout story and the plucky-escape story. Nobody here quits to become a writer; nobody here is destroyed by the job either.

What the novel does instead is track the exact, unglamorous arithmetic of shift work: the commute, the target sheet, the small status economy of who gets the good headset. It is closer to reportage than to drama in places, and the novel is honest enough to let that be a feature.

The prose is functional rather than lyrical, which suits the material more than it would suit a different book. Notes from the Night Shift will not be to every reader's taste, but it is one of the few recent Indian novels to take call-centre work seriously as a subject rather than a punchline.

“Iyengar's characters don't escape the night shift. The book's honesty is in admitting most people don't.”