The Last Hangman — Shashi Warrier

A powerful, harrowing book exploring a great moral question: when does one who kills become a murderer?

In the heat and the dust of the Indian south, the last hangman of Travancore commits his life to paper. In seven notebooks he remembers the people he has killed, calmly recalling the final struggles of the criminals he hung by the neck to die. Remarkable and haunting, delicated and assured, this novel is a meditation on death and what it means to end a life.