What if everyone in the world had one person who believed in them unconditionally?
That question may seem simple on the surface, but it can be immensely powerful if true. Because most of us never find that person. Most of us grow up with parents who are chained by their own unlived dreams, teachers who only see our flaws, and partners who are too busy navigating their own fears to pay attention to ours.
Soundarya Balasubramani spent five years writing about what happens when you do find that person — and what it costs to lose them.
The result is 1000 Days of Love, her debut novel and third book, which launched for pre-order in August 2026 after nearly 1,800 days in the making.
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From Nonfiction to Novel
To anyone who has followed Balasubramani’s work, a novel was not the obvious next step.
Her first two books — Admitted, a guide to navigating university admissions, and Unshackled, co-authored with an immigration lawyer — were practical, research-driven, and rooted in the South Asian immigrant experience. She had built a following of over 500,000 people across social media, founded one of the largest communities for skilled immigrants in America, and was known as a writer who helped people navigate systems.
Fiction, by contrast, is an act of surrender. You cannot research your way to the truth of it.
“I want to create something that makes me so frustrated and pushes me to my limits that doing it is torture,” she shares. “But not doing it is silent death.”
That line captures the tension that drove the book’s entire journey.
1,800 Days
The novel did not begin with a plot or a character. It began with fragments — small observations collected over years. A quote from AR Rahman that she read in a book (“Maybe we were all born perfect, but then we became imperfect along the way due to the choices we made.”) A verse from a song (“Gajumaru”). A thought she had while drying her hair at the gym (“Could we combine the book tour with a musical concert?”). Over time, a folder grew to tens of thousands of words, none of it a novel yet, but all of it pointing toward one.
In June 2024, she finally began charting the outline. By August, she wanted to quit.
I feel like a writer who is too scared to write; afraid to begin working on 1000 Days of Love again, worried that the words on the page will not come remotely close to encapsulating and conveying the story in my mind. Not a single day passes by when I don’t think about the book. But I’m scared. Somebody help me, please.
– From her journal entry (August 15, 2024)
She didn’t quit, though.
Instead, she moved into a small house on a farm in Tamil Nadu and spent two months writing in near-isolation, producing over 60,000 words. From there, she traveled to a second farm in Bangalore, followed by four months on a 400-acre farm in Montana. Finally, the novel’s fifth and final draft was completed in an Airstream parked next to the California coast.
In between, she was also accepted into Faber Academy’s novel-writing program in London — one of 15 writers selected from around the world that Fall — and was assaulted on the street within days of arriving, breaking her nose. She flew home to India. She kept writing.
The manuscript went through two intensive rounds of editorial feedback, including a full edit by Nathan Bransford, former literary agent at Curtis Brown, who returned it with over 10,000 comments.
By the end of it all, she’d spent more than 1,000 hours.
But then, one must ask, why do this in the first place?
The Man Behind the Story
In July 2021, Balasubramani received an introduction to a man named Rajesh Setty. One email became thousands of conversations. Over the next five years, he became her godfather, her sounding board, and the emotional seed for the novel’s central relationship.
Setty has lived with Parkinson’s since 2014. He has undergone two brain surgeries, tried countless treatments, and spent years unable to leave his home. He is also, by every account of those who know him, one of the most joyful people alive.
It was that contradiction — a man stripped of so much, still choosing to give — that became the moral center of the novel.
1000 Days of Love follows Riya Shankar, a 25-year-old South Asian woman who leaves the American Midwest for San Francisco chasing meaning, ambition, and a fresh start. At her lowest point, she meets Sri — an older man living with Parkinson’s whose unconditional belief in her changes everything she thought she understood about love, family, and loss.
Sri Bellur, the character inspired by Setty, is fictional. The novel is not his biography. But Sri’s generosity, his terrible jokes, and his stubborn insistence on finding beauty inside suffering all began with one email to a stranger.
It is, as Balasubramani describes it, “a story about love, but it is not a love story.”
“Once, Rajesh commented this (image below) on a post of mine in response to someone else,” Balasubramani shared. “I truly hope, from the bottom of my heart, that this book is a gift to the world.”
What Comes Next
1000 Days of Love is available for pre-order now at www.1000daysoflove.com. Launch events are planned across ten cities in the US and India in 2027. A course on building lasting relationships, created with Setty himself, is also available to those who pre-order.
For a writer who spent years helping immigrants navigate systems, this book is something different: quieter, harder, and more personal. It is the work of someone paying very close attention to what matters, and finally finding the words for it.
