The Light at the End of the World
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its distant past and its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents fiction for our time.
Delhi, the near future: Bibi, a low-ranking employee of a global consulting firm, is tasked with finding a man long thought to be dead but who now appears to be the source of a vast collection of documents. The trove purports to reveal the secrets of the Indian government, including detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and alien wrecks discovered in remote mountain areas.
Bhopal, 1984: an assassin tracks his prey through an Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.
Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft that might stave off genocide.
And in 1859, a British soldier rides with his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each protagonist must come to terms with the buried truths of their times as well as with the parallel universe that connects them all, through automatons, spirits, spacecraft, and aliens. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in fifteen years, is a magisterial work of shifting forms, expanding the possibilities of fiction while bringing to life the India of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deb (The Beautiful and the Damned) returns after 12 years with an ambitious and phantasmagoric epic spanning two centuries of India's tumultuous history. In 1984 Bhopal, an assassin is assigned to shadow a suspected whistleblower at an American chemical plant, right before it explodes. Deb then flashes back to 1947, with India about to achieve independence, for the story of a Calcutta veterinary student who becomes involved with the mysterious "Committee" and its attempts to build an aircraft based on an ancient manual. Another jump takes readers to 1859, after the failed Sepoy Mutiny, when an English soldier follows his colonel into the Himalayas as part of an expedition to capture Magadh Rai, a fugitive mutineer. These stories are bookended by sections set in a near-future India, where a former journalist tries to track down an ex-colleague who has long been thought dead but might still be alive. All the stories have elements of the fantastic, not just in the near future with a chimeric figure known as the New Delhi Monkey Man, but in 1859 with a troop of automaton Sepoys. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author uses magic realism to shed new light on historical events. Filled with poetic imagery and dialogue, and subtle connections among the stories, this is a novel to get lost in.
