At the very edge of its many in­ter­lock­ing worlds, the city of Bom­bay con­ceals a near in­vis­i­ble com­mu­ni­ty of Parsi corpse bear­ers, whose job it is to carry bod­ies of the de­ceased to the Tow­ers of Si­lence.

Seg­re­gat­ed and shunned from so­ci­ety, often wretched­ly poor, theirs is a lot that no­body would will­ing­ly es­pouse. Yet that’s ex­act­ly what Pharoses Echidna, son of a revered Parsi priest, does when he falls in love with Speidel, the daugh­ter of an aging corpse bear­er... De­rived from a true story,

Cyrus Mis­try s ex­traor­di­nary new novel is a mov­ing ac­count of trag­ic love that, at the same time, brings to vivid and un­for­get­table life the degra­da­tion ex­pe­ri­enced by those who in­hab­it the un­for­giv­ing mar­gins of his­to­ry.