'Wry Tamil humour is a distinct form of telling a story; there is something uncomplicated and good-natured about it. I am glad English readers are going to get a feel of it. If you know Tamil, you'd think you're reading Tamil, and if you don't know Tamil you would think you're reading your mother tongue. Also, who would have thought Aurangzeb could be so entertaining.' - MANU JOSEPH

'Comprehensively irreverent, this genre-bending, sparklingly witty novel fuses history with the wryness of our own times. Bringing together a long-dead Mughal emperor and the impulses of the Instagram generation, it throws the reader headlong into a marriage of parody with social commentary. I was, in succession, befuddled, amused, alarmed, but always also spellbound.' - MANU PILLAI

Charu Nivedita is the author of more than sixty works in Tamil, ranging from collections of essays to novels, anthologies of poetry to short stories. Known as a postmodern, transgressive writer, he is most interested in autofiction and metafiction. He is best known for the novel Zero Degree, which was longlisted for the 2013 edition of Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and has found a place in several academic syllabi in India and overseas. His books Marginal Man, To Byzantium: A Turkey Travelogue, Unfaithfully Yours, Morgue Keeper and Towards a Third Cinema have been translated into English and published by independent presses. Charu Nivedita lives in Chennai with his human and animal family.

Nandini Krishnan is the author of Hitched: The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage and Invisible Men: Inside India's Transmasculine Networks. She is also the award-winning translator of Estuary and Four Strokes of Luck by Perumal Murugan, and Ponniyin Selvan by Kalki Krishnamurthy. Nandini's novel-in-manuscript won the Caravan and Writers of India Festival contest 2014. Her translation of Sajjad Haider Yaldram's short story, ‘Save Me from My Friends', was shortlisted for the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu–English Translation 2022. Nandini lives in Madras, with dozens of animals, thousands of books, and a varying number of humans.