Category: Fiction
Publisher: Westland Books
Rights: World English rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent), Translation rights available for Indian and international languages (excluding Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, French)
The narrator of this story travels to Gilgitia Til Mas, a city submerged by a hydroelectric dam a couple of centuries ago. He goes there to assess whether it’s a fit place for steel plants. What he finds in the newly resurfaced Gilgitia Til Mas, however, are the ruins of a two-hundred-year-old mental asylum and a manuscript that survived the disaster.
As he sets out to decipher the diary of a madman—a man who suffered a grievous head injury in his mother’s womb at the hands of a violent father—the story plunges headlong into another book. The brittle pages of this ancient diary hurl us into the madman’s existential dislocation, his traumatic experiences of institutional cruelties and societal alienation. Khalid Jawed’s poignant lyricism captures the raw, often brutal, emotional landscape in piercing detail.
The Book of Death is a searing exploration of self-harm and suicide, and of our distorted perceptions of identity, legitimacy, marginalisation and the suffocation they subject divergent individuals to.
Translations:
Maut ki Kitab – The Telugu translation of Maut ki Kitab
The author: Khalid Jawed
The translator: A Naseeb Khan