Blue-Skinned Gods

From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a groundbreaking, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials—tests of his power that will prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. But does he truly pass them? The answer isn’t clear, and over the next decade, as the story of his family unravels, his relationship to everyone—his dominating father, his beloved cousin, his cancer-stricken aunt, and the young woman he imagines he will marry—threatens to fall apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in a wildly ambitious look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.