Friendship in all its possible forms

Book Review

Title: The Blogchatter Book of Friendship

Publisher: Notion Press, 2026

Pages: 249

What does it mean to be a friend when life changes, relationships fail, age separates people, and death itself intervenes? Eighteen writers come together in this book with one short story each to give us an answer to that question. This Book of Friendship looks at friendship not as a single emotion but as a many-sided human relationship.

Friendship is one of those words we use so casually that we rarely stop to ask what it really means. A friend is usually understood as someone we like, someone whose company we enjoy, someone with whom we share memories, interests and perhaps secrets. But friendship can be much more than companionship. It can be loyalty, care, the willingness to stand beside another human being when everyone else has walked away.

The short stories in this anthology explore precisely this many-sided nature of friendship. Though all the stories are bound together by the same theme, they do not repeat the same idea. Instead, each story approaches friendship from a different direction, making the collection feel like a set of variations on a deeply human theme.

In the very first story, there are four aged women who meet every evening. Their meetings may appear ordinary, even uneventful, but beneath the routine lies something precious: the need to remain connected to other human beings as age gradually shrinks one’s world. Friendship here is about little more than mere presence which can become an “anchor” for each other.

Friendship may arise between a new bride and an old woman next-door. Or a widowed mother may be thrown out of home by her own sons and be taken in by a poor woman abandoned by her husband. And a deep bond emerges between the two women and the newcomer becomes an affectionate grandmother and the best friend of the boy in that house.   

A supernatural touch appears in a couple of stories. A friend appears in the middle of the night with a request: his wife, believed to have died in an accident, is actually alive, and he wants someone to help her. The man turns out to be a ghost in the end.

There’s a suspense thriller too in between, for a change. A forbidden love and an attempted murder. But a rare friendship emerges in the process.

Friendship is ultimately less about what we receive from another person than about what we are prepared to do for another. It may be expressed through small acts of attention, companionship, remembrance, protection, care…

What makes this anthology appealing is precisely this variety. Friendship can arise between any two persons. Age is not a matter. Even accidents like religion and language needn’t be a concern at all. There’s a story about a friendship that evolves quite unexpectedly between a cynical Indian tourist guide and a naïve foreigner. The story also raises a question about how far can a friend influence the character of the other.

Though most of the stories in the collection appear as unassuming as friendship on the surface, many of them carry the potential to make us think of certain deeper issues of life. Loss and nostalgia, displacement, abortion and guilt, neurosis, self-sacrifice… well, quite a lot of themes emerge when we look at the stories once more.

In the end, these stories invite us to look again at the people around us and ask a deceptively simple question: Who is truly a friend?

The answer, the anthology seems to suggest, may not always be the person we expect.

PS. The third story in the anthology, ‘The Man at the Gate,’ is mine. I left that out of the purview of this review.

Buy the book here.