Red Brick House Press

Poetry and prose · 2026

Nobody Told YouIt Would Feel Like This

A collection in four parts by Surya Sabarwal

Cover of Nobody Told You It Would Feel Like This: the title in large type across a black and cream split, with Poems and Confessions and By Surya Sabarwal beneath

You already know this feeling.

The one that sits in your chest at 2am when you’re fine, absolutely fine, and then something small breaks you open.

Nobody Told You It Would Feel Like This is a debut poetry and prose collection moving through four parts of one life. From the defiance of youth to the weight of love and loss, from the unglamorous work of surviving to what remains when everything else falls away.

Written for anyone navigating heartbreak, grief, identity, and the quiet courage it takes to keep going.

For the ones who cared too much, lost more than expected, and are still somewhere in the process of healing.

Part poetry. Part confession. Part survival guide.

Somewhere in these pages is the sentence you’ve been looking for.

Paperback: October 2026 Kindle: November 2026

Bookstores, libraries and other countries

You will do things in a relationship

you would never do to a stranger,

and you will have a reason for every single one.

Epigraph to Room Temperature

The shape of it

What’s inside

Every piece opens with an epigraph, a single line that tells you where you’re headed before you get there. A preface and an introduction on the way in, and an epilogue written to you, the reader, on the way out.

  1. Part I

    The One Who Didn’t Know Yet

    Everything felt permanent. Nothing had happened yet.

    Ages 16 to 19

  2. Part II

    The Weight of Wanting

    You loved. You lost. You didn’t know which hurt more.

    Ages 19 to 21

  3. Part III

    The Discipline of Surviving

    The turn. Not resolution, recognition.

    Ages 21 to 25

  4. Part IV

    What Remains

    The version of you that made it through.

    Ages 25 to 28

An excerpt

From the Preface

Your best disguise is your voice.

At first you’d think it’s a haircut. Or a jacket that costs more than it should. Or the one camera angle where your jaw looks like it has a plan. I have tried all of those, and the one inch lifts stuffed into my shoes, and I can tell you it’s the voice.

A good guess would be the eyes. The eyes come close. But nobody ever says the voice is the one that never lies.

How do I know? I don’t. Not properly. All I have is the life I’ve lived, and the last decade of it has been spent twelve hours away from my parents.

One day, a rough one, I ducked our usual video call and rang instead. Old fashioned. Just a voice.

Two words in, maybe five, my mum asked if I was okay.

So much for the disguise.

It might have been a fluke. I don’t think it was. She asked the way people ask when they already know and are giving you the first move. And on a day I couldn’t have explained myself to anybody, somebody already understood. That turned out to be enough.

I told her I was fine. I wasn’t. Everything I didn’t have the courage to say on that call is in the pages that follow.

That was the Preface. It only gets more honest from here.

Keep reading

Details

Title
Nobody Told You It Would Feel Like This
Subtitle
Poems & Confessions
Author
Surya Sabarwal
Publisher
Red Brick House Press
Formats
Paperback, 134 pages, 6 × 9 in. Kindle ebook.
ISBN
979-8-234-26549-4 (paperback)
Language
English

Sometimes you don’t need resolution.

You just need to get to tomorrow.