Raw, tender, and darkly comic, The Abyss is widely considered a masterpiece from Jeyamohan, a writer whose body of work has shaped modern Tamil literature.Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful, God-fearing man about town: he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and money to pay for their dowries. However, it’s an open secret that his success is fueled by a trade that is as profitable as it is cruel: he owns—and breeds—a group of physically deformed beg...

A riotous, masterful, and tender portrait of the real modern India as seen through the truth-refracting fiction of Tamil literature's greatest living storyteller.A stunning new literary vision of India. In these dozen minutely observed stories, Jeyamohan juxtaposes the great themes of Indian life—politics, religion, caste, violence—in illuminating relation to the quiet internal machinery of his characters.In “A Hundred Armchairs," a bureaucrat receives the ...

A dazzling postcolonial inversion of Heart of Darkness set during the Great Indian Famine of 1878 that recounts its devastating cost to both life and human dignity.It is 1878, and Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer in Madrasapatnam, loyal servant to the crown and Queen Victoria, knows that there is no danger that he ought to fear in this heatblasted and famine-devastated land.But when he discovers two laborers from Tudor Ice Company being brutall...

Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful and God-fearing man about town–he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and ample money to pay for their dowries. However, it is an open secret that his success is fueled by a tawdry yet deeply profitable trade–for he owns a group of physically deformed beggars and places them outside various temples to make money for him. The beggars are mere "items" to Pandaram, hardly human, to be bought and sold like cattle. But when the novel descends right int...