HOT OFF THE PRESS

Legal Fiction by Chandan Pandey

- HarperCollins India

A late-night phone call from his exgirlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP–Bihar border. The reason – Anasuya's husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor, and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared. Soon after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police are refusing to register a missing person case, Rafique’s student Janaki has also disappeared, and the locals are determined to turn it into a case of ‘love jihad’. And when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.

Inspired by true events from today’s India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.

Chandan Pandey is the author of three short-story collections and one novel in Hindi. He has won the Bharatiya Jnanpith’s Navlekhan Award, the Shailesh Matiani Katha Puraskar, and is a recipient of the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship.

Bharatbhooshan Tiwari is a writer and translator in Hindi and English.