Tiger at Twilight and Cyclones

Manoj Das . . . [will] take a place on my shelves beside the stories of Narayan Graham Greene This volume presents two celebrated novels by Manoj Das, one of India s most illustrious authors, who has been writing in English and Oriya for over six decades. In A Tiger at Twilight the erstwhile raja of Samargarh returns to his abandoned palace in Nijanpur, after years of self-exile, with his sick daughter and his supposed half-sister, and immediately assumes the responsibility of killing a man-eating tiger. Assisting him are a few noted men of the valley including Dev the owner and manager of a resort. But as the hunt intensifies Dev realizes that things aren t as they seem: Heera, the raja s sister, has an inexplicable power over the men in the hunting party and a strange connection with the tiger. As the men get closer to killing the beast, bizarre things begin to happen, hinting at the influence of the supernatural. Cyclones is set in Kusumpur, a small coastal village, during the struggle for Independence. The village is devastated by a cyclone and Sandip, the scion of the zamindari family, helps restore it. The war-time colonial government, though, wants to turn the sleepy hamlet into a busy port town. They plan to fill up the river that flows by it, in the process angering all the villagers, including Sandip. But when the contractor for the project is found murdered, Sandip is accused of the crime, forcing him to flee from the authorities. This is the start of a series of adventures that take him from a remote ashram in a forest to the city where communal violence is rife. Cyclones is a powerful novel about the metaphorical storms that gripped the nation during the most turbulent period of its modern history.