The Devourers

For readers of Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and David Mitchell comes a striking debut novel by a storyteller of keen insight and captivating imagination. On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man's unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger's behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins. From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in seventeenth-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman—and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok's interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent. Shifting dreamlike between present and past with intoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel. Advance praise for The Devourers "A wholly original, primal tale of love, violence, and transformation . . . I've never read anything quite like it." —Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Red Rising Trilogy "Astonishing . . . a narrative that takes possession of you and pulls you along in its wake." —M. R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts "Every sentence of this ferocious and extraordinary book pulses with life. An absolute masterpiece." —Daniel José Older, author of Half-Resurrection Blues "Profoundly moving and endlessly inventive." —Ken Liu, World Fantasy Award–winning author of The Grace of Kings "This book will leave you breathless. You've never read anything like it, and you won't forget it anytime soon." —Mallory O'Meara, filmmaker "Das's brutal, intoxicating, and gorgeously visceral debut merges an often mythic sensibility with an appreciation for the coarse beauty of the everyday." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Intense and thrilling . . . Indra Das's writing is powerful and precise." —Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars "Lush, dark, deep, and truly extraordinary, The Devourers is a transformative and spellbinding story like no other." —Lila Bowen, author of Wake of Vultures ( RT Book Reviews Fantasy Novel of the Year) " The Devourers is a hallucination disguised as a novel. One moment its vision spans centuries and a thousand lives; the next you're transfixed by the sound of an insect in flight, or a jewel of blood dripping from an open wound." —Peter Watts, author of Blindsight "Like no other imaginary realm I've visited, the land of The Devourers shimmers with rapturously visceral details." —Nisi Shawl, James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award–winning author "Postmodern and historical, massive in scale and heartbreakingly intimate, fragmented and a powerful whole, it's so many marvelous things, all at once." —Carmen Maria Machado, Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award–nominated author From the Hardcover edition.