Some novels ask what science can do. An Echo from the Past asks the harder question: what happens to the people left standing after it’s done? Rajiv Seth’s second book of The Unforgiving Stars Duology picks up nearly two decades after the first book, Stolen from the Stars, and wastes no time turning a scientific triumph into a very human reckoning. The story has moved from the pine forests of Shillong to the misty hills of Coonoor - a quieter, more secluded world that feels, at first, like a place to disappear into. That’s exactly what its central character has done. Dr Aarika Dubey is a respected small-town physician and single mother. She is also, in truth, Dr Anjali Sharma: the geneticist who once did the unthinkable and has spent nineteen years since, guarding the secret of what she made. That secret has a name: Gagan. Her creation, now on the cusp of adulthood, he has no idea he wasn’t born so much as reconstructed - built from the DNA of a man his mother could not let go of. Seth...