A romantic comedy · by M. A. Khan · Publish Prime Publishing
COFFEE?
A Romantic Comedy Novel
Standalone novel · Paperback, 617 pages · Hardcover · eBook · Published by Publish Prime Publishing
He asked a court for permission to die. Life made a counter offer.
A warm, wry romantic comedy about burnout, second chances and one catastrophically literal answer to a one-word question.
The story
Ayaan Khan survives on order. Order got him out of a childhood where everything vanished, through university, into a career good enough to support his whole family, and finally to a Bombay courtroom where, at twenty-six and utterly hollowed out, he asks the law to let him stop. Justice Arvind Rao refuses in two words, pours him tea, and tells him to disturb his life.
Dubai is the disturbance. So is Leila Haddad, the architect who colonises his window table and finds his outrage delightful. Their friendship is built out of arguments about tea, drawings rescued from under coffee cups, and the growing, terrifying evidence in Ayaan’s own spreadsheet that feelings refuse to be modelled.
Then Leila asks him to coffee. Ayaan, who has misread nothing in his professional life, tells her he only drinks tea. By the time he understands the question, the window table is empty, the message says delivered and never answered, and Leila is gone.
Years later, on a conference stage in Singapore, he gets one more chance to answer a one-word question properly. The stakes are simple: everything he built while learning to live, against the one person who made living feel like the point.
Life is not asking you to win today. It is asking you to show up tomorrow.
Read it if you love
If you loved the precise, wounded charm of Eleanor Oliphant, the spreadsheet courtship of The Rosie Project, or the grumpy tenderness of A Man Called Ove, Ayaan Khan belongs on your shelf. COFFEE? shares their DNA: a hero whose logic is both his armour and his comedy, a supporting cast who refuse to let him hide, and a story that treats depression and burnout honestly while still making you laugh on the same page.
The opening pages
Ayaan Khan had spent three weeks preparing the document that asked the court to let him die.
It ran to seventy-eight pages.
There were appendices.
Justice Arvind Rao noticed the appendices first.
He sat behind the raised bench, spectacles low on his nose, turning the pages with the slow suspicion of a man who had spent thirty years watching people make bad decisions and then present them as legal arguments.
Rao looked over the top of his glasses.
The young man standing below him did not look mad.
That would have made things easier.
He looked exhausted.
There was a difference.
A note instead of reviews
This book is newly published, so there are no reader reviews here yet. We would rather show you an empty box than a fake one. The excerpt above is the book’s real opening. If the voice makes you smile, the rest of the book keeps that promise.
Questions, answered
Is this part of a series?
No. COFFEE? is a complete standalone novel of 86,326 words.
Do I need to have read the author’s other books first?
No. COFFEE? stands entirely alone.
Which format should I choose?
The paperback is a 617 page, 5 x 8 edition. The hardcover is the same text reset as a 6 x 9 edition. The eBook is for readers who prefer a screen.
Is the story the same in every edition?
Yes, word for word identical.
Also by M. A. Khan
M. A. Khan writes warm, dialogue-driven fiction about people who are excellent at everything except being happy, and what happens when life interrupts them. COFFEE? follows one meticulous engineer from a Bombay courtroom to a Dubai cafe table and back again. He is also the author of I Can’t (And Then I Did) and Blood, Time and Judgement.