HOT OFF THE PRESS

“Like a family around a dinner table, the tales in [Half Gods] support, contradict and argue with one another. They provide a rich disorder”

HarperCollins India is delighted to announce the publication of Half Gods by AkilKumarasamy, in India in October this year.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Half Gods is a critically acclaimed debut, a collection of interconnected short stories following the lives of a multigenerational Sri Lankan Tamil family, by the US-based author of Indian-Tamil origin.

In anticipation of the book’s release in India, Udayan Mitra, Publisher–Literary at HarperCollins India, said, “Akil Kumarasamy’s is a terrific new literary voice and Half Gods has already been widely acclaimed and admired internationally.

We at HarperCollins India are very excited to be publishing this exceptional book of short stories, and hope that readers in India and the subcontinent will be as thrilled as we are to acquaint themselves with Akil's exceptional world of ideas and words.”

Speaking about the themes that the book sets out to explore, the author, Akil Kumarasamy, said, “I wanted to explore the messiness of identity, whether that is nationality, religion or sexuality, by unraveling the notions of the self. When borders are fictitious, bloody lines drawn by colonists, what does it mean to call oneself Indian or Sri Lankan? The structure of the book falls between a story collection and a novel; it is, like us, uncontainable.”