ANILIKHA O ANILIKHA

Anilikha O Anilikha by Abhijnan Roychowdhury opens on August 6, 1945 — the day an eight-year-old boy named Asahi loses everything. In this haunting Bengali literary fiction, Asahi channels his grief into building a robot modelled on a child his age: curious, flower-loving, star-gazing, hungry for stories. But beneath its innocent exterior lies a darker question — has he engineered something monstrous? Simultaneously, a wartime letter written by a soldier, lost and later recovered, travels to England in search of its intended recipient — who may already be dead, or may be waiting still, beyond the threshold of science and reason. These two narratives converge around Anilikha, a character so beloved she has inspired not one but two spine-chilling novels. Abhijnan Roychowdhury's propulsive, razor-sharp prose carries readers breathlessly from the first page to the last — this is Bengali fiction at its most electrifying.