In a dusty caravanserai in seventeenth-century Mumtazabad, Cyrah, a young wanderer, meets a man who says he is a monster. Their encounter fills her with revulsion and dread, yet changes her forever. In present-day Kolkata, college professor Alok Mukherjee meets a man who claims to be a werewolf. Alone and estranged after a divorce, Alok is drawn to the stranger's hypnotic allure, unable to tell delusion from truth, trickery from magic. Beginning in Mughal India by the foot of the Taj Mahal and ulminating in the lush, dangerous forests of the Sunderbans in twenty-first century India, The Devourers is a story about shape-shifters, hunters with second selves who prey on humans and live in the shadows of civilization. But it is also about what it means to be human and the transformative powers of love. Utterly gripping and wholly original, it reinvents the literary fantasy novel for India, imbuing it with depth, emotion and richness.
"This is an intense and thrilling novel spanning centuries of Indian life, injecting into that immense history a kind of under-story or inner story that casts a new light on everything we thought we knew. Indra Das’s writing is powerful and precise, it grabs you and propels you along quite vividly. I’ll be looking forward to reading more by him.”
--Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt.
