Father Gabriel's Crypt

In most of his novelettes for young readers, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (b.1935), one of the major figures in contemporary Bengali fiction, tells the story of a teenager discovering himself in his encounters with forces of both good and evil, including bullies and hoodlums, sometimes a golden-hearted thief taking pride in his professional skill, and benevolent ghosts! Father Gabriel’s Crypt, the first of these work to be translated into English, has a mix of adventure, suspense, fun and whimsy rarely so well combined.

Even as children’s literature becomes globalized, Thema launches a series of Indian children’s classics in translation, each of them rooted in the culture and sensibility and experience of a particular region of the country, offering young readers in other regions rare insights into the lives and feelings of the children of that region, opening up the possibility of a fraternization of young people beyond geographical borders and barriers of language.