Scott Carney
Hachette India
272 pages, R550
A shocking tour through a macabre global underworld where organs, bones and live people are bought and sold on the red market. Carney uncovers this deeply secretive trade in human bodies and body parts in its varied forms: an Indian village nicknamed “Kidneyvakkam” because most of its residents have sold their kidneys for cash; unscrupulous grave robbers who steal human bones for anatomical skeletons used in Western medical schools; the ancient Tirumala Venkateswara Temple near Tirupati that makes money selling the hair of its devotees to wig-makers in the US.