Books & Literature
The Living Dead
By Raj Shekhar
Some people die while they are still living. Others continue to live long after they are dead.
For seven generations, his family has built coffins, tombs and mausoleums for the dead. But for one coffin maker, death is more than an inherited profession: it is an obsession, a mystery and a mirror held up to life’s contradictions. In a kaleidoscopic world where reality slips into dreams, hallucinations, fairy tales and magical realism, the dead return, ancestors step out of portraits, a parrot tells extraordinary stories and a mysterious ivory coffin carries an ancient curse. Here, the living, the dead and the living dead coexist beyond the boundaries of time and reason.
Beneath these unsettling visions lies a deeply human story of love, loss and family. Through his relationships with his mother, his wife and his dead twin brother, the narrator confronts the gulf between belief and understanding, love and responsibility, existence and fulfilment. Darkly imaginative and philosophical, The Living Dead is not simply a novel about death: it asks what it truly means to be alive.
