Raw, tender, and darkly comic, The Abyss is widely considered a masterpiece from Jeyamohan, a writer whose body of work has shaped modern Tamil literature.

Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful, God-fearing man about town: he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and money to pay for their dowries. However, it’s an open secret that his success is fueled by a trade that is as profitable as it is cruel: he owns—and breeds—a group of physically deformed beggars and places them outside temples to collect money.

There is Mangandi Samy, with just one arm, no legs, and “a little head on top,” who only speaks in divine songs he himself invents; Ahmedkutty, an intellectual whose testicles hang to the floor “like two great pumpkins”; Muthammai, mother to eighteen children. To Pandaram, they are only “items,” to be bought and sold like cattle. But when he makes an impulsive trade, his luck turns.

Written with an unflinching eye and suffused with a deep existential longing, The Abyss is an extraordinary novel—for its terrain, its fundamental questions about humanity, and its depiction of human suffering and liberation.