From the award-winning author of Hangwoman.Late one night in November 2016, Satyapriya, a middle-aged professional living alone in a big city, is attacked by an unidentified assailant. Though she escapes unhurt, a conversation with her paralysed father reveals that this was no random incident but the latest in a series of attempts to kill her. And when he dies unexpectedly soon after, a devastated Satyapriya sets out to unravel the conspiracy coiling around her. Beginning at the height of India's demonetization drive and culminating on the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, this is a novel that raises uncomfortable questions of identity and gender in a country where power, patriarchy, caste and money conspire every day to shape the contours of women's lives.K.R. Meera's Assassin - originally published in Malayalam as Ghathakan, and brilliantly translated by J. Devika - is a genre-defying magnum opus that every Indian must read.

Translated from the Malayalam by Abhirami Girija Sriram and K.S. Bijukumar Jezebel, a young doctor in Kerala, struggles against the cruel realities of a patriarchal world-realities that not even her education, resolve or professional brilliance can shield her from. Her already contentious divorce proceedings go suddenly awry, and her unhappy marriage holds complex secrets. In K.R. Meera's blistering new novel, which takes the form of a courtroom drama to show us the rich inner worlds of its characters, we see Jezebel reflect on her life and its pivotal points as she takes the stand. Through her memories, we see her grow from a reticent, serious young woman to a rebel who refuses to bend to the conventions of society. Like the Biblical story of Queen Jezebel, who was much maligned as a scheming harlot and infamously thrown to her death from her palace window, Jezebel is a novel that asks if independent women can ever live lives that are free of judgement K.R. Meera's...

'A literary heavyweight'—Indian ExpressIn these bold, wry and ebullient stories, Meera's astonishing range of narrative techniques is on full display as she expertly lays bare the faultlines behind the façade of everyday life, sometimes with dark humour and sometimes with astoundingly bitter sadness.

Young and impressionable, Prema is deeply infatuated withYudas, the enigmatic man who dredges corpses from the bottomof the nearby lake. Longing to be rescued from the tyranny ofher father, a former policeman who zealously tortured Naxaliterebels during the Emergency, Prema dreams of escape and findsherself drawn to the Naxal political ideology. Convinced thatYudas was one of the inmates at her father's prison camp,Prema believes that only he can save her. But Yudas is hauntedby secrets of his own and, like his biblical namesake JudasIscariot, bears the burden of crushing guilt.

The Grddha Mullick family takes pride in the ancient lineage they trace from four hundred years before Christ. They burst with marvelous tales of hangmen and hangings in which the Grddha Mullicks figure as eyewitnesses to the momentous events that have shaped the history of the subcontinent. In the present day, the youngest member of the family, twenty-two-year-old Chetna, is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father Phanibhushan. Thrust suddenly into the public eye, even starring in her own reality show, Chetna's life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. As the day of her first execution approaches, she breaks out of the shadow of a domineering father and the thrall of a brutally manipulative lover, and transforms into a charismatic performer in her own right. Meera's spectacular imagination turns the story of Chetna's life into an epic and perverse coming-of-age tale. Will the ardent young woman be able to escape the...