The Light at the End of the World

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. (May)