Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Literary Fiction
ISBN-10: 1521857946
Type: Fiction
Pages: 453
Copyright: 2017
ISBN-13: 9781521857946
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
A Journey to Paradise, through Hell.
Smast is a millionaire, and yet he is starving. He has an indomitable spirit, and yet he’s every bully’s punching bag. His wishes and dreams have infinitesimally small life-spans—most of them die at conception. His first desire ever to take shape— to see a carnival—results not only in his abduction, but also in his being convicted for the crime committed against him! Before a storm of deceit, revenge and murder blows him to the hangman’s gallows, he experiences a breeze of kindness from Pragvi —a girl crushed under the burden of an unspeakable guilt.
He escapes from prison and takes refuge in a remote Himalayan valley with its own way of life. His wounds start to scab over, but an requited love and an unrelenting evil are both on his track…
Epic in its sweep, reminiscent of Thomas Hardy in its evocation-of-nature scenes, and peopled with a Dickensian cast of characters, Soaring of the Wingless is a heartwarming, multi-layered novel reviving the delights of 'tales-within-tales' storytelling.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Fence
As it descended, the sun relented. It slipped behind the hills and caressed the scorched earth with its honey-colored fingers. Shadows grew bold and began to mingle together, rejoicing in the day’s decline.
A wind sprang up from the east and, like a country woman plucking wild flowers, started gathering small, hot eddies swirling in the underbrush. An, old wooden fence stood rotting in the middle of a clearing in a jungle of the Himalayan foothills. The fence’s planks rattled in rheumatic protest as the wind gathered strength.
Young, wild grass hemmed the fence in on all sides—the lush, long blades of grass began to mock the fence’s creaking rigidity by singing and dancing to the wind’s rhapsody.
Suddenly a figure, perhaps of a boy or of a man, came running out of the darkness that had begun to thicken around the edges of the clearing. It rushed toward the fence, and just when a heads-on collision between flesh and wood appeared inevitable, the figure got airborne with a leap. As it hung midair for a fraction of a second, the sinking sun became its gigantic halo. Its bare feet struck the upper plank of the fence, and the figure tumbled into the rustling grass below.
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