A riotous, masterful, and tender portrait of the real modern India as seen through the truth-refracting fiction of Tamil literature's greatest living storyteller.

A stunning new literary vision of India. In these dozen minutely observed stories, Jeyamohan juxtaposes the great themes of Indian life--politics, religion, caste, violence--in illuminating relation to the quiet internal machinery of his characters.

In A Hundred Armchairs, a bureaucrat receives the news that his mother has been found in a hospital for the indigent. As he rushes to her side, he is visited by memories of his nomadic youth with her, of her violence and mania, her wild fear for his safety, his forced adoption and education by a local guru. In Elephant Doctor, a young man spends a restive night at an elephant camp waiting for a call from the office of the president; he has spent months advocating for an award for his idol, Dr. Krishnamurthy, one of the country's preeminent conservationists. But in the still hours of the morning he's haunted by questions about the doctor's enigmatic ways and the strange magic of this dark corner of the forest.

The tales in Stories of the True live in the shadowland between truth and fiction, blending real life with the prismatic effect of Jeyamohan's volatile and incisive prose. The result is a collection that shimmers with life and wisdom and a truth greater than truth all on its own.

Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful, God-fearing man about town: he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and money to pay for their dowries. However, it's an open secret that his success is fueled by a trade that is as profitable as it is cruel: he owns--and breeds--a group of physically deformed beggars and places them outside temples to collect money.

There is Mangandi Samy, with just one arm, no legs, and a little head on top, who only speaks in divine songs he himself invents; Ahmedkutty, an intellectual whose testicles hang to the floor like two great pumpkins; Muthammai, mother to eighteen children. To Pandaram, they are only items, to be bought and sold like cattle. But when he makes an impulsive trade, his luck turns.

Written with an unflinching eye and suffused with a deep existential longing, The Abyss is an extraordinary novel--for its terrain, its fundamental questions about humanity, and its depiction of human suffering and liberation.

Jeyamohan's body of work has shaped modern Tamil literature: raw, tender, and darkly comic, The Abyss is widely considered his masterpiece.