Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Professor Nada Marjanovic has spent more than twenty years translating an obscure Sanskrit text on the vetala, a parasitic, vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she finds herself face-to-face with the undead that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her lover–and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge.

THE VETALA is a fiendishly entertaining book in which a deep knowledge of South Asian lore and literature serves a lusciously horrifying evocation of a macabre and eerie India in which human love provides the only promise of possible redemption from a terror that persists across centuries of transmigrating spirits.–Lee Siegel