The book launch of “ESCAPE” by Manjula Padmanabhan

Venue: Pasha, The Park, Chennai

In a country where women have been exterminated, one little girl remains alive.

Her name is Meiji. Her uncles, Eldest, Middle and Youngest, have raised her against all odds. As her body buds into puberty, her aging guardians realize they cannot protect her from the vicious Generals who now dominate their world, assisted by artificially created slaves called Drones and marauding bands of wirless Boy Soldiers who rove a brutalized landscape through which Youngest and Meiji must travel to escape. Youngest will have to dig deep into his resources to ensure their survival. But he has a greater challenge along the way: explaining to Meiji what it means to be female in an all-male world and why she must learn to control the powerful forces that are being unleashed within herself as matures.

A gripping adventure and an oddly poignant romance, ESCAPE is a rigorously imagined, philosophically powerful book that takes a new fact of our present world - the declining sex-ratio- and turns it into a vision of the future. At its core, though, it is an examination of love, of growing pains, of sexuality. From the writer of the Onassis Award-winning play HARVEST, a novel that is disturbing, rich and humane.