Anita Nair’s Good Night & God Bless is like a personal memoir, with a lavish dose of humour, satire and emotion. It hooks the readers with the author’s daily concerns, from her personal relationships to conversations, to moments of elation. One can take just a chapter at a time, get a hang of the author’s day and leave one’s worries behind, enough to end a day with a smile. Anecdotes as footnotes, sometimes a few famous quotes, Nair makes sure readers don’t feel the need to look elsewhere for more on her world. Whether it’s stories about her daughter, the rest of her family or her dog, it’s through every day conversations, shopping and her writing that Nair tries to give readers a glimpse of her not-so-unusual world.In more than ten years of her writing, Anita Nair’s most popular books have been usually thought provoking, be it The Better Man or The Ladies Coupe, but this time around, the author has a pleasant surprise with a breeze-through kind of novel, the one where she aptly wishes you Good Night & God Bless.

The book has a whole lot of with droll quotes and footnotes, some of which are as long as half a page. In fact, these are pleasant diversions, when you decide to go along with the flow of the book and enter Nair’s charmed world. There aren’t any major philosophies coming your way but there are some nuggets of living that do make sense.The section on mothers and daughters for example, would find an echo in most women. “A daughter’s struggle with her mother is what shapes her journey through childhood and makes her a woman. But what kind of a woman is the moot question.”

A charming feature of the book is the little casual sketches that suddenly pop up at the reader. …Sketches of a dog, a snail, a table and chair, add to the sense of comfort. Readers in the habit of getting a glass of warm milk before bedtime could easily replace their milky drink with Goodnight and God Bless.

It’s a collection of essays presented as chapters in a book by and about the author. She’ll tell you about the many flavours of her happiness… You’ll get tips on which books to read, how to differentiate between gourmets and gourmands, how to enjoy being a celebrity-author… There are voluminous footnotes, a recommended reading list at the end and even a couple of tiny shocks to remind us that life isn’t all fresh laundry and double beds….

Informed by a gentle literary sensibility, Nair’s Goodnight and God Bless (elegantly produced in hardback by Penguin-Viking) is a collection of 42 short, personal essays that, whether talking about gardening, travel, strange hotel rooms, parenting, food, literary friendships, or pets, evokes a book-haunted life…. This is the writer as reader. She can’t speak or judge any longer from a reader’s innocence. Yet the desire persists. To simply, as Salinger once asked of us, “to read and run.” Nair’s new book of non-fiction carries with it the added pleasure of “footnotes, quotes and other such literary diversions”.

The 42 essays of her life and times have been interwoven with personal and anecdotal history of hers and her family members. Tucked away in the witty lines is the writer’s mind and her ironic take on things small and big.

With ‘Good Night and God Bless’, her life and literature have definitely reached an interesting dimension.