August 17: A Novel of Power and Rebellion | From the JCB Prize-Winning Author of Moustache | Translated Indian Fiction
About this audiobook
'A genre-defying, history-smashing novel' - SHAHNAZ HABIB
'Brilliant, and superbly translated' - TANUJ SOLANKI
From the JCB Prize-winning author-translator duo of Moustache
Perfect for readers of political fiction: Arundhati Roy's A God of Small Things, Perumal Murugan's Poonachi, and Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water
On 17 August 1947, the kingdom of Thiruvithamkoor declares itself a free nation, refusing to join India. In the years that follow, it becomes a republic of coups, betrayals and revolutions - chronicled by a shadowy informant known as the CID.
Through his eyes, S. Hareesh reimagines Kerala's history as an alternate world where the lines between fact and fiction, faith and power, sanity and madness blur beyond recognition. At once speculative history and sly metafiction, August 17 explores how nations are built - and undone - by the stories they choose to believe.
Brilliant, subversive and darkly funny, this is a novel of astonishing scope and imagination. Rendered in Jayasree Kalathil's masterful translation, August 17 confirms Hareesh - winner of the JCB Prize for Moustache - as one of the most daring and original voices in contemporary Indian fiction.
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About the author
S. HAREESH is the author of two novels and three short story collections. His novel Meesha won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Deshabhimani Award; and its English translation Moustache (translated by Jayasree Kalathil) won the 2020 JCB Prize for Literature. His short story collections include 'Adam', which received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, Rasavidyayude Charithram, and Appan. He is also a recipient of the Geetha Hiranyan Endowment, the Thomas Mundassery Prize and the V.P. Sivakumar Memorial Prize. Hareesh hails from Neendoor in Kottayam district, Kerala.
Jayasree Kalathil is a bilingual writer and translator, and the author of The Sackclothman, a children's book that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi and Urdu. Her translations have won the Crossword Book Award (twice), the JCB Prize for Literature, the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Award, the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, and the Muse India–G.S.P. Rao Translation Prize Jury Commendation. Jayasree has also been shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's National Translation Award in Prose. She has received the 2026 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship and the 2025 Camargo Foundation Fellowship, Cassis, France, and was the translator-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, UK, in 2023. Currently, she is the managing editor of translated fiction at The Bombay Literary Magazine, and a mentor on the ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship Programme. She lives in the UK.
