In the heat and the dust of the Indian south, the last hangman of the former princely state of Travancore commits his life to paper. In seven notebooks he remembers the people he has killed, calmly recalling the final struggles of the criminals he hung by the neck to die. The Last Hangman is a remarkable and haunting novel, a meditation on death and what it means to end a life. This powerful and harrowing book explores a great moral question: what differentiates a killer in the cause of just from a murderer?