Siddharth Shanghvi pens book on mortality

Award-winning author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi will come out with a memoir on death and grief, drawing on a string of personal losses - of his parents and a beloved pet.

In Loss, the author will chart the landscape of bereavement as he takes the reader down the dark, winding path to healing.

In three essays in Loss', I've tried to look in the eye what I have lost; I never thought that everything, and everyone, we have lost could mark our character so profoundly, says Shanghvi, whose first novel The Last Song of Dusk won the Betty Trask Award, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize.

Udayan Mitra, publisher (literary) of HarperCollins India, terms Loss as an incredibly powerful book about bereavement and grief - a personal ode to the mortality and transience that define human existence.

Loss will hit stores next summer.

Shanghvi, whose second book The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize, wishes he could say that loss and the accompanying grief makes one a better person.

Mostly, I have found, loss exhausts you; often, it leaves you bitter. And yet it gifts the living something: detachment, a cool cleanness for seeing people as they are, so that you might love them without having to like them, he says.

The only thing we can do for anyone, beyond even love, is to acknowledge them as they are, for whom they are, even if it is to let them go from our lives, he adds.

Goa-based Shanghvi's most recent book is The Rabbit & the Squirrel.