The Girl in Room 105

The Girl in Room 105 is a crime novel by the Indian writer Chetan Bhagat, published in 2018 and his eighth novel.

Bhagat had built a large readership on stories about young people negotiating study, work and family in contemporary India, and this book keeps that setting while adding a murder: the coaching centre, the examination system, the ambitions of parents and the compromises of a graduate who has not found the career he was promised are all part of the plot rather than decoration. The novel is framed as a story told to the author himself by a fellow passenger on a late-night flight, which allows the narrator to address the reader directly, explain the parts of the case he does not understand and argue about the politics and stereotypes the investigation keeps running into. Keshav is not a detective and does not pretend to be one, so the book is closer to a personal account of a crime than a procedural, and the humour comes from the same place as the dread. It became a bestseller on advance orders alone, which says something about the size of Bhagat's audience by this point in his career.