The Shoot

The stories in The Shoot are set in semi-rural Assam, in a world where the boundary between people and the creatures around them keeps dissolving. Rivers, forests and the moon seem alive in these pages. The characters are solitary men and women, foresters, hunters, boatmen and awkward boys, and they find themselves drawn into bonds with civets, sparrows, rhinos and elephants, as well as leopards, snakes, horses and dogs. Sometimes the connection they end up making is with themselves.

The collection moves between brutality and gentleness, between acts of revenge and quiet, unspoken love, and between deep loneliness and small, unexpected miracles. Dhruba Hazarika writes with compassion and keeps the tension high, so these are stories about the natural world and about where people fit within it.