Category: Fiction
Rights: All rights available
At fourteen, Maria’s life is shattered by betrayal when she is impregnated and abandoned by her lover, Peter. She is forced into a loveless marriage to preserve the fragile honour of her family. What follows is a slow-burning transformation.
Humiliated, cornered, and denied tenderness, Maria learns early that survival demands reinvention. After her father’s death, she takes charge of his failing butcher business and fights her way into economic independence with a ferocity that unsettles the men around her.
Reborn as Panangkeri Maria, a woman whispered about in scandal and remembered in legend. She seduces, provokes, manipulates, and refuses every moral code imposed upon her. Families fracture around her. Men fall under her spell. Society condemns her even as it cannot look away.
Yet beneath Maria’s notorious exterior lies an ache that power cannot soothe. Her life becomes a relentless pursuit of fulfilment through desire, revenge, and domination, until she is finally forced to confront the emptiness at the centre of her rebellion.
Spanning five decades and populated by vivid lives drawn from the streets, markets, toddy shops, and political undercurrents of Thrissur. Bold, sensual, and emotionally devastating, the novel asks a timeless question: what destroys a person more completely – carnal sin, or the failure to know oneself?
The author: Lizy Joy
The translator: Nandakumar K