The Black Hill

Mamang Dai

Aleph Book Company

308 pages, Rs. 395

This novel is set in mid-nineteenth-century north-east India, when the East India Company was seeking to make inroads into the region. The local people—the Abor and Mishmee tribes in particular—feared and resisted their coming. The author takes a historical event—the mysterious disappearance of a French priest, Father Nicolas Krick, in the 1850s, and the execution of a Mishmee named Kajinsha for his murder—and weaves a gripping, densely imagined work of fiction around it.