Why am I passionate about this?

I spent my childhood treading the Aravalli jungles with my naturalist father, catching snakes and spinning yarns and I learnt early that the most dangerous creatures are rarely the ones with fangs. My father, Raza Tehsin, raised me with the rational approach of solving any mysteries that I came across—whether in nature or otherwise. I grew up to become a writer. Across my twenty-odd published books, from nature writing to my historical mystery novel The Witch in the Peepul Tree, I have experimented with form and genre across age groups and remained fascinated by mysteries. My latest, The Fourth Girl, is a psychological thriller about three friends and the girl who vanished from their lives. 


I wrote...

The Fourth Girl

By Arefa Tehsin ,

Book cover of The Fourth Girl

What is my book about?

For two decades, the three survivors have lived down a mysterious disappearance. They have become bestselling authors, formidable diplomats and…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Moonstone

Arefa Tehsin Why I love this book

I read this novel as a teenager who had just moved from the heavier Russian and Hindi classics to the lighter English ones. And was I hooked! It remains a lifelong favourite. 

The men in The Moonstone think they're running the show. They aren't. The women are—through letters, through silences, through one servant girl whose sections broke my heart so thoroughly I had to put the book down and go have a handful of namkeen.

Rosanna Spearman deserved better, and a hundred and fifty years later I'm still cross about it. That's what a good book does to you. It makes you hold grudges on behalf of people who never existed.

By Wilkie Collins ,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Moonstone as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?

A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.

One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after…


Book cover of Big Little Lies

Arefa Tehsin Why I love this book

Since my early reading days, I had this habit to just sit in bed with a book at night and munch on snacks till wee hours of the morning. I got rid of it for long years but this book again made me reach for my namkeen containers and peanut pouches! 

All that gossip and trivia-night silliness in the book turns out to be camouflage for something much darker. Madeline made me laugh, Celeste made me want to reach through the pages. And the murder, withheld till the end—victim and killer both—was a killer!

Scarves off, Moriarty! 

By Liane Moriarty ,

Why should I read it?

21 authors picked Big Little Lies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*Published as BIG LITTLE LIES in Australia and the United States*

Liane Moriarty, million copy selling author of The Husband's Secret brings us another addictive story of secrets and scandal.

Jane hasn't lived anywhere longer than six months since her son was born five years ago. She keeps moving in an attempt to escape her past. Now the idyllic seaside town of Pirriwee has pulled her to its shores and Jane finally feels like she belongs. She has friends in the feisty Madeline and the incredibly beautiful Celeste - two women with seemingly perfect lives . . . and their…


Book cover of Forward

Forward by Iulia Dobre-Trifan,

A novel about becoming, healing and courage, which spans over 40 years, interweaving complex characters from different worlds, all gravitating around a common timeless axis: the desire for happiness.

Lia, a tenacious woman who has been working successfully on her own for many years, starts a new project, one that…

Book cover of We Were Liars

Arefa Tehsin Why I love this book

There's a moment in We Were Liars—anyone who's read it knows exactly which one—where I had to close the book and sit still for a moment.

I trusted Cadence. That was a reader’s mistake and Lockhart's design. The whole story was told in prose that kept splintering into fairy tales, and I followed her through it like a sleepwalker.

When the truth finally surfaced, I opened the Amazon app and bought a physical copy (I was reading it on Kindle) to gift to my partner. 

By E. Lockhart ,

Why should I read it?

17 authors picked We Were Liars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

The TikTok phenomenon and #1 New York Times bestseller.

A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends-the Liars-whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honouree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

Don't miss FAMILY OF LIARS, the thrilling prequel to We Were Liars, published in May 2022.


Book cover of Where the Crawdads Sing

Arefa Tehsin Why I love this book

A reader friend recommended this book strongly, but I approached it a bit tentatively at first. Then the marsh swallowed me whole.

What dragged me in wasn't the murder trial, gripping as it was, it was Kya herself, this abandoned girl learning gulls and shells and loneliness the way other children learn arithmetic. I've grown up visiting forests with my naturalist father and still live in wild places so I was quite taken by the natural world written with such tenderness or a woman's solitude given such dignity.

And that ending was simply gasp-worthy. 

By Delia Owens ,

Why should I read it?

61 authors picked Where the Crawdads Sing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…


Book cover of Heels to Hiking Boots

Heels to Hiking Boots by Sue Muller Hacking,

Won a Silver medal from The 2025 Global Book Awards in the category of Biographies and Memoirs – Travel.

A memoir of self-growth, hard lessons, and inspiration for anyone yearning for a life of adventure and the courage to pursue what it means to find home.

Raised in rural Pennsylvania…

Book cover of Rebecca

Arefa Tehsin Why I love this book

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"—I read that line as a teenager first, and it still tickles my spine.

What haunts me most is that Rebecca herself never appears on a single page, yet she runs the entire novel from her grave: every room, the marriage, every secret bends around a dead woman's will.

And our narrator, so timid she isn't even given a first name, walks through it all while I gripped the book, whispering Get out, get out. Mrs Danvers would frighten a reader more than any knife-wielding villain in modern thrillers. No wonder it’s an all-time classic. 

By Daphne du Maurier ,

Why should I read it?

58 authors picked Rebecca as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY
* 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS
* 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'

Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…


Explore my book 😀

The Fourth Girl

By Arefa Tehsin ,

Book cover of The Fourth Girl

What is my book about?

For two decades, the three survivors have lived down a mysterious disappearance. They have become bestselling authors, formidable diplomats and celebrity icons. When a funeral reunites them in Colombo, a journalist starts digging into their buried past and asks the one question they can’t answer: What happened to the fourth girl?

They discover that some ghosts refuse to stay dead. The reckoning they’ve always feared has finally arrived.

Book cover of The Moonstone
Book cover of Big Little Lies
Book cover of We Were Liars

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