Mad Sisters of Esi

Tashan Mehta

Aug 2025 · Astra Publishing House

About this ebook

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi meets Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler in this stunning meta fantasy about the power of stories, belief, and sisterhood

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung flees, beginning an adventure that will spin her through dreams, memories, and myths

Ask for the story of the mad sisters of Esi, and you’ll get a thousand contradictory folktales. Superstitious sailors, curious children, and obsessed academics have argued over the particulars for generations. They have wondered about the mad sisters’ two greatest marvels: the museum of collective memory that sprawls underneath our universe, waiting for any who call for it, and the living, impossible, whale of babel.

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to their creator, the Great Wisa. For Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

When Myung flees the whale, she stumbles into a new universe full of people, shapeshifting islands, and argumentative ghosts. In her search for Great Wisa and her longing for her sister Laleh, Myung sets off on an adventure that will unravel the mystery that has confounded everyone for centuries: the truth about the mad sisters of Esi.

Fables, dreams and myths come together in a masterful work of fantasy full of wonder and awe, that asks: in the devastating chaos of the world, where all is in flux, and the truth is ever-changing, what will you choose to hold on to? And what stories will you choose to tell?

Ratings and reviews

This book left me reeling—in the best way. Tashan Mehta has crafted a world so vivid, so immersive, and so original that it could only have been written today. Yet it speaks with a timeless awareness that makes the story feel eternal. At its heart, this is a tale of sisterhood—not rivalry, not conquest, but the aching, mythic pull to reunite.

This was a strange book. There were several storyline that all intersected and overlapped to weave a stunning story. It swept me uo and kept me interested, while still managing to not be too confusing, even when listening to it on an audiobook.

About the author

Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi was published by HarperCollins India in 2023 and won the AutHer Awards for Best Novel. Her debut novel, The Liar’s Weave, was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award. Her short fiction has been anthologized in Magical Women, the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian Science Fiction: Volume II and Solarpunk Creatures. She was fellow at the 2015 and 2021 Sangam House International Writers’ Residency, India, and writer-in-residence at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, and has mentored at numerous writing residencies. She studied at the universities of Warwick and Cambridge, and currently resides in Mumbai.