Publisher's Synopsis
The Last Hangman is a powerful, sparsely written novel that explores, in brutal detail and measured prose, the life of a man who killed for a living. In the heat and the dust of the Indian south, the last hangman of Travancore commits his life to paper. Into seven notebooks he remembers the men he has killed, calmly calling to mind the final struggles of the men he hung by the neck to die. The Last Hangman is a remarkable and haunting novel: a meditation on death and what it means to end a life. It is a challenging and harrowing book that explores a great moral question: when does someone who kills become a murderer?
