Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of Democracy in India

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An incisive, lyrical, and deeply reported account of Indias descent into authoritarianism.

Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbingand disturbingportrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelists precise language and eye for detail.

sounds the alarm now that the worlds largest democracy is under threat in ways that echo the fissures in the United States, United Kingdom, and so-called democracies the world over.

Reviews

Praise for Siddhartha Deb One of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.Pankaj Mishra Praise for The Light at the End of the World A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Extraordinary . . . I was in awe of Debs imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughss Naked Lunch, while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian . . . That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the authors way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that . . . Whatever the authors intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other. Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review The Light at the End of the World is full of intriguing puzzles and opacities, but what brings it to life is less its inventiveness than its galvanizing anger, its outraged awareness of exploitation and cruelty. It travels, unbounded, into the past and the future, yet it always meets the reader in the middle of these destinations, the broken world of the present. Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Deb explores a range of alternative explanations for and ramifications of historical events . . . Working in a speculative mode, Deb imagines a kind of agency for his characters barred to them by historical, and present, realities. The New Republic

Author Bio

Born in Shillong, India, Siddhartha Deb lives in Harlem, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open Prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, New Republic, Baffler, n+1, Dissent, and Caravan.