Legends of Khasak — O.V. Vijayan

This is the much-acclaimed first novel by one of India's greatest living writers, translated into English for the first time. A restlessness born of guilt and despair leads Ravi to embark on a journey that ends in the remote village of Khasak in the picturesque Palghat countryside. A land from the past, potent with dreams and legends, enfolds the traveller in a powerful and unsettling embrace. Ravi is bewitched and entranced as everything around him - the villagers, their children whom he teaches in a makeshift school, the elders who see him as a threat; the toddy-tappers, the shamans - takes on the wuality of myth. And then reality, painful and threatening, begins to intrude on the sojourner's resting place and Ravi begins to understand that there is no escape from the relentless dictates of karma...