New Delhi : Westland Books announced the pre-orders for The Book of Death by the JCB Prize for Literature 2022 winner Khalid Jawed, translated into English by A. Naseeb Khan.
The Book of Death is a Doestoevskyan work that combines the mundane with the metaphysical. The narrator who opens it goes to Gilgitia Til Mas to research whether two multinational firms could set up steel plants there. He finds out that years before this, an international archaeological institute had sent a six-member team to this region, where a small city named Girgita Til Mas existed about two hundred years ago. It was particularly renowned for a mental asylum. The city was purposefully submerged in water for the construction of a hydroelectric dam by the central government.
However, due to the ecological imbalance, all the rivers in the region either dried up or changed their courses. Mountainous terrain transformed into plains, and the power plant became as useless as a limb without function, so it was demolished. The city resurfaced with its ruins and debris. It was established that a mental asylum existed at this site once. The narrator found a manuscript among its ruins, which is at the heart of this novel.
Interested in ancient manuscripts, the narrator sets out to decipher a madman’s diary, a man who suffered a severe injury to his head in his mother’s womb at the hands of his violent father. This diary is the story within the story. As it unravels, our second narrator’s relationship with his abusive father, his constant companion, the idea of self-harm, the two women in his life, and the terrifying void that swirls around him, introduces us to the most striking aspect of Khalid Jawed’s writing: the crackling mix of metaphysics and banality.
Speaking about the book, Khalid Jawed said, ‘This book is about a man who suffered a severe head injury when he was in his mother’s womb at the hands of his father. You can read this novel as a book of life too, because the ideas of death and life are interchangeable in the madman’s diary. I’m thankful to Westland Books for publishing this long-awaited translation of my novel.’
The Book of Death is now available for pre-order across all major online retailers and will be released in stores and online on 25th August 2025.
