Welcome to the fictional hill town of Didoli, where Shashank Gupta’s stories uncover the strange, tender and sometimes terrifying lives beneath its quiet surface.
Above a lake, beneath restless mountains, people tell stories to explain what frightens them. Rumours spread. Old loyalties crack. Unlikely people become heroes, monsters, or both.
Gupta’s fiction is fiercely observant and often wickedly funny, with compassion running beneath its darker currents.
Five novels. Didoli at the heart. Many ways to be human.
From the hills of Didoli to darker corners beyond, each book opens onto its own unforgettable lives.
An elephant falls from the mountains. A stranger takes the wrong road. Six lives collide.
Above the town of Didoli, an eccentric guesthouse shelters unfinished lives, corrosive secrets and the improbable consequences of an elephant blocking the road.
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Three women are dead. A strange story takes flight. Fear becomes a law of its own.
Didoli is gripped by rumour and violence. In a world of superstition, exclusion and desire, a community must confront what it chooses to believe.
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The clock stops at two. The town freezes. One man knows why.
Sissoo Dalber has lived by his own peculiar rules. When the secrets of Didoli’s clock—and of its people—surface, absurdity gives way to questions of freedom, duty and dignity.
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“This cottage of ours stood away from Didoli town for that's the way Ammu had wanted it. Up here in the mountains the only buildings you saw were oaks, pines and chestnut ... the only noise you heard was of the wind, the birds and the stream in the gorge far below.”
In the hill town of Didoli, each of the five visitors to the house on the gorge has a story. The avuncular mongrel called Vurf, a spirit bearing a message for a stepdaughter, the urchin with her golden hair and a vagabond past, a fading child star too wise for his years and an autistic infant who can smell tomorrow. Their lives are entwined over a span of thirty years in a thinking world that seems to say: you grow up to become your childhood.
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At sixty, when most men retire into emptiness, Uncle, our wrinkled protagonist, comes back with a flourishing brothel at his dead father’s mansion and there begins a search for the ultimate pleasure.
He dives into the darkness exploring the sin of the flesh, dictated by the devil from a distant past: a stepmother he loved to destruction. She is the only emotion, the only trace of warmth and love in Uncle’s otherwise cold heart: it is she who taught him the value, as she saw it, of mortal life and human sacrifice. His mind is complex yet simple in its desires, resting on dark sarcasm and unpredictability, that compels one to relish every word, every move and every absurdity with a curious hunger. Unable to remain lucid, he floats dangerously in and out of reality and dreams, not knowing where one ends and the other begins.
Roads curl into mountains. The lake holds its silence. The town watches, judges, whispers—and remembers.
The house, the killings, the clock and the beehive are not merely backdrops. In these novels, the landscape itself feels like another character.
Fictional geography. Real human contradictions.
Shashank Gupta is an Indian novelist whose work ranges across literary fiction, horror, romance and writing for younger readers. Born in 1965 into a farming family, he studied horticulture and worked as a farmer before pursuing a career in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. This varied background gives his fiction an acute sense of place and a close interest in human behaviour. Several of his novels return to the fictional hill town of Didoli, using its social relationships to examine class, fear, belief and moral responsibility. His books include Pimp, Visitors to the House, Four Chimneys, Bloodhive and Sissoo. In Bloodhive, a series of unsettling deaths becomes a lens through which to explore scapegoating and collective anxiety.
Stories behind the stories, directly from the author. Select an interview to watch it here or open it on YouTube.
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Explore five novels by Shashank Gupta, with Didoli at the centre of many of their stories.