HarperCollins announces A brilliant whodunit, A political thriller and An extraordinary fable about the world we live in LEGAL FICTION: A Novel By Chandan Pandey Translated from the Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

A late-night phone call from a forgotten ex-girlfriend forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi. The reason: the ex’s husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared.

As soon as he lands up in the mofussil town of Noma on the border of UP and Bihar, he realizes that things are not as they seem. The police refuse to register a missing person’s case, his ex is pregnant, Rafique’s student Janaki has also disappeared, and the local elites seem hellbent on explaining it away as a case of ‘love jihad’. But when Arjun delves deeper into Rafique’s disappearance, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.

Told with psychological acuity, deft prose and inspired by true events from today’s India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant whodunit, a political thriller and an extraordinary fable about the world we live in.

 

‘Every time I try to speak about why I came to write this work, I find myself with new answers. Sometimes I think I have answered it in my title – about the legal fictions that our society propagates. Sometimes I think about the spate of mob lynchings in recent days. I still want to not believe in the fact that there have been lynchings just to get some political mileage. For me, after this, the whole idea of society has become compromised. So the forces that made me write this novel were the easy belief of the public in false narratives and fake news. I wanted to explain that, in these surreal times, many mob lynchings are the result of precisely orchestrated activities.’

– Chandan Pandey

 

‘Chandan and I have known each other for more than a decade but hardly communicated. But a year ago, when the pandemic had not yet acquired its monstrousness, I got hold of a copy of Vaidhanik Galp and was moved to ask his permission to translate parts of the novel – as I could never imagine myself finishing a book-length translation. It’s only after I had finished close to a quarter of the text in a couple of weeks that I started believing that I could really do it all. The next four or five months were quite intense, as Chandan and I went over multiple drafts, sitting in different time zones, grappling with the realities of the ‘new normal’. It was pretty exhausting, to be honest, but the sense of achievement and satisfaction I feel looking back at those months is unmistakable.’

– Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

 

‘We’re very excited to have acquired the publishing rights to the English translation of Chandan Pandey’s brilliant Vaidhanik Galp – Legal Fiction. This is an urgent, topical novel that has set the Hindi literary world talking, and one that will resonate equally with readers in English. It is a book for our times and will be the highlight of our translations list for 2021’.

– Rahul Soni, Executive Editor – Literary, HarperCollins India

 

About the Author and the Translator

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.

 

About Harper Perennial

Harper Perennial is a dedicated imprint for translations, showcasing the finest and most compelling narratives from Indian languages – books that are timeless and stories that capture the essence of their times and the region from which they emanate. In its entirety, the Perennial library which features well over a hundred titles presents the kaleidoscope of India as seen through the eyes of the greatest modern writers writing in the local languages, comprising award-winning and well-loved novels, short fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, biographies and travelogues.

In the recent past, Harper Perennial has published a select list of titles in translation that readers have enjoyed – including S. Hareesh’s JCB Prize winning Moustache (translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil), Jayant Kaikini’s DSC Prize winning No Presents Please (translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana), Jnanpith awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Avasthe (translated from the Kannada by Narayan Hegde), JCB awardee Benyamin’s novel Body and Blood (translated from the Malayalam by Swarup B.R.), the Crossword Book Award winning Diary of a Malayali Madman by N. Prabhakaran (translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil), Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue Is Like Blue (translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai) which won the Atta Galata–Bangalore Lit Fest Award for Best Fiction of the year as well as the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, and many others.

 

About HarperCollins Publishers India

HarperCollins Publishers India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India has been awarded the Publisher of the Year Award three times: at Publishing Next in 2015, and at Tata Literature Live! in 2016 and 2018.

HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Egmont, Oneworld, Harvard University Press, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet.

 

For more information please write to

jaseya.fazili@harpercollins.co.in