Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Rights available: World (excluding Indian subcontinent)
It is Goa in the monsoons. A shy and lonely teenage boy finds himself drawn towards a circle of young men and women holidaying at the same hotel. In their midst is Momo, the girl he will do anything to be close to. As if sensing his need, they adopt him, and at the end of a long and intense day of ragging, they tell him about the strange circumstances of their friendship. Bonded by illness, ruled by a small, absurdly well-read man with baby cheeks, the group dubs him ‘the innocent’ and challenges him to provide an answer to the riddle of their condition. The boy, discovering in himself a hitherto untapped gift for fiction, tells them the story of the Land of the Well. Expecting praise, and further acceptance, he is horrified when the outcome is an alienation more complete than he has ever faced before. A novel that examines this age of anxiety, wherein the bodies of the young and successful erupt in ways that mirror their innermost traumas, The Land of the Well walks the treacherous line between fact and fantasy, between erasure and compulsive recording.
