Book Title: The Book of Death
Author: Khalid Jawed
Publisher: Ekadā
Number of Pages: 132
ISBN: 978-9371979689
Date Published: Aug. 25, 2025
Price: INR 338
Book Review
Khalid Jawed’s “The Book of Death” is a meditation on mortality, first published in Urdu as ‘Maut Ki Kitaab’ in 2011. Translated into English by A Naseeb Khan, the book is less a conventional novel than an experience, with a fragmented, poetic, and unsettling narrative.
The story is told as a text within a story, with a scientist surveying the ruins of a drowned town to assess its suitability for a steel plant. The town, once called Girgita Til Mas, was submerged to make way for a hydroelectric dam, but due to ecological imbalances, the rivers dried up and the power plant became defunct. Out of these ruins emerges a voice, intimate and broken, telling the story of a man born into violence.
The father-son dynamic gives the novel its torturous moments, with the protagonist resembling his father physically but being branded illegitimate. Women play a crucial role, with the protagonist’s most loyal companion being Suicide, personified as an angelic, shape-shifting shadow. Suicide proudly says, “I have placed Suicide in my torn shoe, like the final weapon that will obey my command at the right time.”
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The protagonist’s refusal to yield, despite constant negotiations with Suicide, is a paradoxical assertion of that very freedom.
A highly recommended book for a vivid imagination and a yearning for a unique storytelling.
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