The Valley of Masks - Tarun J Tejpal

Tarun J. Tejpal has been a journalist for close to thirty years. He is the editor of Tehelka, a news organization famed for its public interest journalism. His novels The Alchemy of Desire and The Story of My Assassins have received worldwide recognition.
One of the most attractive Indian writers in English of his generation, he writes with a great deal of raw energy, inventively employing images which are at once sad, haunting, horrendously comic and beautiful.’

The Story of My Assassins

A muscular, deeply incisive and deathly funny comment on twenty-first century India, The Story of My Assassins is a multi-layered novel that skillfully slashes through the subcontinent’s dubious spiritual serenity to lay bare every crippling divide of language, wealth and class. Trawling life and death in the dark underside, it inquires into the inexorable codes of power and wealth that propel societies. A triumph of disparate voices, unbearable realities, and impossible conundrums, this is a book that will forever change the way we look at the world around us.

Intrepidly Conceived and ingeniously executed, The Story of Assassins combines a fierce political imagination with a tender solicitude for the losers of history. It sets a new and formidably high standard in Idian writing in Englsh.

                                                                                                  - Pankaj Mishra

The Valley of Masks

‘This is my story. And the story of my people.’

The Valley of Masks examines the pathologies of power, purity and dogma to give us a frightening yet ultimately redemptive vision of the future. In the words of Ashis Nandy, critic and social commentator, ‘This brilliant, superbly imaginative but terribly disturbing novel transcends borders, cultures, reading habits and literary fashions. As a story of the inhumanity of any human search for absolute perfection, it probably has no parallel in our literature. As a fable, it has a moral that will return to haunt you.’