A BEAUTIFUL DECAY: A Novel - Aleph Book Company, 2022
“A searing ode to the eternal city of Varanasi—gritty, atonal, and refreshingly unsentimental” — Aatish Taseer
“A Beautiful Decay is a supremely confident and thoroughly entertaining debut by Madhok... Blessed with wit, wisdom and linguistic flair, this is a novel that’s going to feature on a lot of year-end lists soon.” - Aditya Mani Jha, Mint Lounge
“Madhok has penned an immigrant novel with a proper feeling of the 2020s. He touches on the gun violence that has become far too common in the United States, he gives a strong millennial edge to South Asian diaspora narrative, and most importantly, he has created a character who is easy to root for.” - Kiran Bhat, The Bangalore Review
Named among the top-ten Indian fiction books of 2022 by GQ India and the Best of Fiction - 2022 by Bound.
Vishnu, a twenty-one-year-old Indian student out drinking in a bar in Washington D.C., is murdered in a hate crime. At the moment of his death, Vishnu takes flight and traces the sequence of events that led to his life being extinguished. Speeding through the past, present, and future, his consciousness witnesses the hate and violence on two continents. As Vishnu looks back on his short life, we see the brutal acts of his father who built an empire in the Hindi heartland of India on the blood and trampled beliefs of others so his family could lead the good life. When Vishnu gets to America, he finds that the detestation and othering that targeted one set of people in his homeland is replaced by more of the same in the country he has landed in, except this time he doesn’t belong to the class of oppressors but that of the oppressed.
Visceral and intense, this tremendous debut novel is a clear-eyed look at the barbarity that lies just beneath the surface in countries like India and America and the toll it takes on the lives of innocents.
A BEAUTIFUL DECAY is available now online and in bookstores around the country! Read an excerpt from the novel’s opening chapter on Scroll.
Karan Madhok is an Indian writer, editor, and journalist. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His short story “Public Record” appeared in the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels: Dazzling Stories from the Country’s Finest New Writers (Aleph Book Company 2022), edited by David Davidar.
Karan’s creative work has been published in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. His journalism has been published for NBA, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, Scroll, The Caravan, FountainInk, etc. He is currently working on his first non-fiction book, to be published by the Aleph Book Company.