
“The sense of ‘me’ is detached from the sense of ‘body’…”
For Vikrant, art is not a hobby; it is a war against the mundane.
Trapped in a corporate job and surrounded by what he sees as a culture of generic, “Instagrammable” art, he finds himself alienated
from his friends and his own potential.
But inspiration arrives in a terrifying form.
An unintended oval on a canvas and a malfunctioning film camera lead him down a rabbit hole of drunk philosophy and lucid dreams.
As the oval transforms into the face of a mysterious “Moonchild,” Vikrant’s grasp on the boundary between the waking world
and the dreamscape begins to slip.
Is he breaking through to a higher artistic plane, or is he simply breaking?
Reality cracks. Time leaks. The world will end in 102 days.
A message appears on every digital device on Earth: reality is a simulation―and it’s shutting down.
As the world descends into chaos and eerie “glitches” begin to warp the fabric of existence, five strangers―a jaded journalist, an atheist novelist,
a love-struck cabbie, the Prime Minister of India, and a lonely bartender―grapple with the meaning of life, memory,
and love in a universe that may not be real.
But if nothing is real, what do we hold on to?
There is a whale in the city of Bangalore and only the Listeners can hear it.
The Wanderer, a man suffering from dissociative amnesia, is sucked into this secret world of the Listeners and
joins their search for the mysterious whale. He is unable to hear the song of the whale that beckons the Listeners every night.
Filled with longing for the music, the Wanderer finds strange new friendships and love in this bizarre world of the Listeners.
But the world he has built, sits on the shoulder of a lie.
Caught between the impenetrable wall of his past and the promise of a future, he turns to the Song of the Whale to set him free.
Author Sunil Writes An Ode To Human Condition With Song of the Whale
Season of festivities is here! Here are 10 books to read this autumn
In conversation with Bookishelf
. . . a parable of moralistic character, allegory, a study on the ethical distinction, individualism, transcendentalism, existentialism, madness, all displayed while describing song of the whale
★★★★★
Mitul Patel
About the author
Sunil M S was born in Dharwad, Karnataka, and grew up on a steady diet of books by Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Asimov, Dostoevsky and more. His journey as a writer began in 2009 with narrative poems which evolved into flash fiction, short stories, and now his third novel – Moonchild.
His first novel, Song of the Whale, was published in 2021. His second, Whispers in the Void, was published in 2025. A science graduate and a street photographer, Sunil spends an awful amount of time reading up about the latest in the world of theoretical physics, existential philosophy and literature. He consumes Renaissance and Postmodern paintings obsessively. He currently lives in Bangalore.
