Dimensions
130 x 197 x 19mm
Hiran is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart that is from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr Jonathan Crabbe.
Commissioned to procure a child for Mr Crabbe's opium-addicted wife, somewhere in the slums of Calcutta, Hiran, the simple opium clerk, stumbles upon his own future. He of all men, who can read the lines of fate in a hand, should have been able to foretell how the discovery of the child would change his life forever.
Kunal Basu's truly original first novel sweeps across Asia like a grand adventure, as Hiran, an unlikely hero, is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.
