Catagory: Fiction

AN AWARD-WINNING SHORT STORY COLLECTION BY THE WINNER OF THE JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

‘S. Hareesh, in these astonishing stories, takes an honest joy in human villainy’ ANJUM HASAN

‘An inspired translation of a brilliant constellation of stories’ NAMITA GOKHALE

‘A gloriously tangled web of lives that intersect in hilariously unsavoury, yet always human, ways’ JANICE PARIAT

Four Belgian Malinois puppies, raised by an ex-serviceman, who end up in four different life situations; two men who play a game made out of death notices clipped from newspapers; a man who exploits his friend’s disability to satisfy his own bestial needs; a government employee who is intoxicated by the taste of wild meat and sinks deeper and deeper into the toxic world of hunting; two buffaloes who break away from their butcher, leading an entire village to chase after them; an old man who rejoices in the death of a sworn enemy who was once his friend.
S. Hareesh’s Adam explores the more difficult of human emotions-lust, anger, jealousy, vengeance and greed. Translated from the Malayalam, the collection presents nine unusual stories about ordinary people, their passions and their diverse destinies in a world where humans, animals and nature collide. Hareesh’s unique style of storytelling, which mixes astute social observation with an irreverent and sarcastic tone, makes these stories invigorating, and pushes the craft of the short story to new and refreshing realms.

Eric is a buttoned down Boston boy, a misfit in his family of hearty fisher folk. Uncertain he will ever complete the book on immigration he has been funded to write, he impetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to Mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantry of this colourful new country and its old world charm, and stumbles on an astonishing discovery – his grandfather was one of the Cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundred years ago, and once had another wife. Soon, Eric will find himself abandoning his own tentative future project in search of his family’s other lives.
The Zigzag Way is the story of twentieth century Mexico, through civil unrest and personal calamity; of the exploitation of the Mexican Indians, and their dubious saviours, such as the formidable Doñavera, widow of a mining baron, and eric’s own grandmother, a young Cornish girl whose grave lies in a hillside cemetery. And in unravelling their dark, often violent, histories on the día de los Muertos, the day locals celebrate and remember their dead, Eric comes face to face with his own story, its past and present; even, the afterlife. Haunting and luminous, the zigzag way is a magical novel of strange, elegiac beauty.

A bustling city. A farmstead in a verdant village. A fugitive. A scoundrel. And an unfolding series of events seen through the eyes of a child.

This gritty novel, while offering the reader delightful glimpses of daily life in the two regions of southern India that form its setting, also brings them face to face with the less savoury and disturbing aspects of the human condition. The mostly lovable characters, who are at the mercy of a universe that does not discriminate between good and evil, cannot take anything for granted. Whether man, beast or bird, each must deal with their destiny according to their own nature and instincts. In the end, they find that they have only themselves, and their relationships with each other, to fall back on.

Poignant and perceptive, Chamor will haunt you for a long time.