bFor readers of Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, China Mi ville, and David Mitchell comes a striking debut novel by a storyteller of keen insight and captivating imagination.b pbbLAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER - bNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY iTHE WASHINGTON POSTibrbbr 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 man's unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger's behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins. p 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 dra