Price range: £5.99 through £9.99
In the oppressive heat of a small Tamil Nadu town, strange happenings are common. And the local government secondary school is teeming with supernatural entities.
For Thamarai, an outsider considered strange by her peers, life is dreary and frustrating. She endures nosy neighbours and incomprehensible tuition classes. She despises the way her lecherous English teacher harasses the other girls in her grade. But when Thamarai finds a mysterious notebook full of descriptions of the school’s paranormal phenomena, she wonders if it may hold the key to escape…
“Kuzhali Manickavel is one of my favourite writers, and a completely unique voice. This book is a must!”
– Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Central Station
“Absurd. Clever. Poignant. Irreverent in the best way. Manickavel never falters or panders. Instead, she lets the story play out in its most authentic way, be it form, language or metaphor. This is a coming of age story about a funny, free girl who will not fit in, told in a style that is free and should never be asked to fit in. I’ve been waiting a long time for a novel from Kuzhali Manickavel. In equal parts weird and wonderful, A Compendium of Supernatural Entities does not disappoint.”
– Mahvesh Murad, Writer and Editor
“A strangely poignant tale of hauntings that cross the line between the real and the fantastic. Manickavel expertly captures the lives of the girls enrolled at the GGHSS from a uniquely genre defying point of view. Filled with longings, jealousies and dangers, A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School will compel you to linger with Thamarai and her schoolmates in their spectral halls long after they have graduated and the book has ended.”
– Suzan Palumbo, author of Countess
“wonderfully strange work of magical realism”
– Publishers Weekly
“Compendium is as full of terribly frustrating, idiosyncratically lovable, and powerfully real characters as it is of the supernatural entities that haunt adolescence, from intense, tortured beauty to pestilential porikkis. A sense of place and time and language so precise and vivid that it’s a dangerous phantom passage into another world, itself haunted by many others. You’ve never read anything quite like this before, and you must do so instantly.”
– Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall
