On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the manβs unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the strangerβs behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.
From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in seventeenth-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant womanβand destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alokβs interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.
Shifting dreamlike between present and past withintoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel.
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