Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its distant past and its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents fiction for our time. Delhi, the near future: Bibi, a low-ranking employee of a global consulting firm, is tasked with finding a man long thought to be dead but who now appears to be the source of a vast collection of documents. The trove purports to reveal the secrets of the Indian government, including detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and alien wrecks discovered in remote mountain areas. Bhopal, 1984: an assassin tracks his prey through an Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft that might stave off genocide. And in 1859, a British soldier rides with his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion. These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each protagonist must come to terms with the buried truths of their times as well as with the parallel universe that connects them all, through automatons, spirits, spacecraft, and aliens. T he Light at the End of the World , Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in fifteen years, is a magisterial work of shifting forms, expanding the possibilities of fiction while bringing to life the India of our times. Praise for The Light at the End of the World A New York Times Book Review Editors ’ Choice Library Journal Best Literary Fiction of 2023 “Extraordinary . . . I was in awe of Deb’s imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch,’ while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ . . . That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that . . . Whatever the author’s 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 “While few authors explicitly set out to record the Modi era, there is a group of Indian writers . . . whose works illuminate the realities of life in the world’s biggest, if beleaguered, democracy . . . Deb [is] brilliant at peeling back the façade of promised prosperity to reveal those shut out from dreams of a shining future.” — Financial Times “With its liminal characters and phantasmagoric specters, The Light at the End of the World constantly moves between the realms of the technological and the human, the past wounded by colonialism and the bleak biomes of the future. It is an enraged epic but also one full of humanity; its various epochs of bigotry, intolerance, and hate are interspersed with tender moments of solidarity, love, and compassion.” — The Nation “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 “A work of genius—impassioned, singular, hallucinatory, uncanny—Siddhartha Deb has invented a new kind of subcontinental novel.” —Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs “Mixing fact and fiction, realism and mythology, Deb offers an unrestrained, inventive, and utterly absorbing re-imagining of India’s history and present day.” —Bustle “An epic, time-traveling portrait of India featuring spacecraft, spirits and aliens.” —The Recast, POLITICO “A novel that so brazenly refuses domestication, scorning our grand ideas about what a novel should be, blending realism and mythology, human and machine, the ordinary and the strange, bygone worlds and worlds to come.” — World Literature Today “An epic story that spans centuries and weaves together in unexpected and thought-provoking ways.” —BookBub “On paper, Deb’s novel sounds familiar to other decades-spanning novels that blend the historic with the speculative, especially David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift . But Deb’s book throws an element of delirium into the mix—it’s here the ‘reading while sick’ factor came into play—which takes this strange, sprawling novel into a territory of its own . . . A heady trip into the unexpected, and one whose transform