'Somewhere In The Deep': Author Tanvi Berwah comes out with another South Asian-inspired fantasy

New Delhi: After the success of her debut book "Monsters Born and Made", author Tanvi Berwah has now come out with another action-packed South Asian-inspired fantasy novel, "Somewhere In The Deep".

The young adult fiction, published by Sourcebooks Fire, is a story of 17-year-old Krescent Dune buried under the weight of her dead parents' debt and the ruinous legacy they left behind.

"This book is set in the same world as my debut book 'Monsters Born and Made', on another island which was name-dropped in MBAM and runs parallel to that book. The island, Kar Atish, is a mining island under a tyrannical regime that forces people into bonded labour which makes this island an open-air prison," said the Delhi-based author in a statement.

As per the plot, the only way the protagonist Dune can earn enough money to escape her unforgiving island is by battling monstrous creatures in an underground fighting pit.

However, after the fight goes terribly wrong, she's banned from the pits. Now hopeless, she is offered a deal: in exchange for the erasure of her debts, she must join and protect a hunting party for a rescue mission deep within the mining caves beneath the island.

"Krescent is determined to keep her head down and fulfil her role as the dutiful bodyguard, even though she is trapped underground with her childhood enemy and a company of people who would gladly kill her if they knew who her parents were.

"As they come across creatures she believed only existed in legends, it becomes clear they are in far more danger than she could have imagined," read the description of the book.

While the debut book of Berwah was about the exploration of a society divided on the lines of caste and class, the latest one sees "a united community and the kind of change that it can bring" "Thematically, both books are complementary to each other," she explained.

The book, distributed by Penguin Random House India (PRHI) in India, is currently available for purchase across online and offline stores.