Fall From Away

She has never been anywhere. She has twenty-two words of Korean and she has practised all of them.

Priya Raghunathan is twenty-four. She lives in Coimbatore, she works a call-centre shift she stopped pretending to enjoy around month four, and four years ago a song came on a playlist by accident and she did not understand a single word of it and understood it completely.

When she wins a ten-day trip to Korea on a two-hundred-word essay, she goes carrying a borrowed suitcase with a wheel that pulls left, three steel dabbas of her mother's murukku, and a speech she has built over six weeks in front of a mirror in the dark, in case she ever gets to say it to the singer whose voice got her through the worst year of her life.

She knows the chance of saying it is approximately zero. She practises it anyway, because on the worst night of that year a man she had never met held one note for four seconds, and then the drums came in underneath it, and she got up the next day.

How this book is published. Fall From Away is being released as it is written. This edition is Part One, nine chapters. New chapters are added to the same file as they are finished, and everyone who has bought the book gets every update free, for ever. Buy it once at this price; you will never pay for it again.

Set in Coimbatore and Seoul.

Contents

• PART ONE — THE GIRL WHO DREAMED OF KOREA
• 1. The Nine O'Clock Song
• 2. Two Hundred Words About a Country I Have Never Seen
• 3. Everything I Own Weighs Twenty-Three Kilos
• 4. Annyeonghaseyo, Practised Forty Times
• 5. Four Per Cent
• 6. The Loudest Person in a Very Quiet Room
• 7. Baekmun Sageori
• 8. He Gave It Back
• 9. Nine O'Clock, Indian Standard Time