THE DEVOURERS

A powerful debut from a new voice in modern fantasy, about what it means to be human and the transformative powers of love, set against the rich backdrops of present day and seventeenth-century India

“I'm a werewolf,” he says. Smoke flares out of his mouth in curls that wreath his long black hair, giving him silver-blue locks for a passing second. I don't see him throw away the match, but his foot moves to rub it into the soil”. 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. 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. Beginning in Mughal India by the foot of the Taj Mahal and culminating in the lush, dangerous forests of the Sunderbans, The Devourers is a story about the nature of humanity, and the power love has to transform. Utterly gripping and wholly original, it reinvents the modern fantasy novel for India, imbuing it with depth, emotion and richness. INDRA DAS's speculative fiction has appeared in many publications and anthologies including Clarkesworld Magazine and Asimov's Science Fiction. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle under the tutelage, among others, of George R.R. Martin and Chuck Palahniuk. He divides his time between India and Canada.