About the Book A MALAYALAM TRANSLATION DONE BY AWARD-WINNING WRITER BENYAMIN In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 per cent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labour force is not given the option of citizenship. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called ‘guest workers’ of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles and triumphs. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories, moving from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labour camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony of voices, Unnikrishnan maps a new, unruly global English and gives personhood back to the anonymous workers of the Gulf. This Malayalam translation of Unnikrishnan’s exemplary novel has been done by the award-winning writer Benyamin. About the Author Deepak Unnikrishnan is a resident of Chicago and a lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute. He has taught at New York University Abu Dhabi and was raised in the United Arab Emirates. About the Translator Benyamin is a novelist and short-story writer in Malayalam. His novel Aadujeevitham, which has been reprinted more than a hundred times and has sold over two lakh copies, won him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009 and has been translated into many languages. The English translation, Goat Days, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. In 2018, his novel Jasmine Days won the JCB Prize for Literature and the Crossword Book Award for fiction in translation.
