A Beautiful Decay: a Novel

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 thated to hisife being extinguished. Speeding
through the past, present, and future, his consciousness witnesses the hate and violence on two continents. As Vishnuooks back
on his shortife, 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 couldead the goodife. 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 hasanded 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-eyedook at the barbarity thaties just beneath the surface in countries
like India and America and the toll it takes on theives of innocents.