After years of squandering his creativity, working for a toy company that makes drum-playing monkeys, Jithendran dies rather abruptly, leaving behind some notes on a novel that he had dreamt of writing in his youth. As his wife Ann Marie begins to read the fragments of his unfinished book and the many love letters he had sent her during their courtship, the sweeping saga of a village called Thachanakkara unfolds. Set against the changing socio-cultural fabric of Kerala since the early twentieth century and moving into the first decade of the twenty-first century, it traces the history of mankind through three generations of a feudal Nair family and the people that surround it. With a hundred-odd characters and reminiscent of epic novels like Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude and Sunil Gangopadhyay's Those Days, A Preface to Man remains a grand tribute to Kerala and also an artistic meditation on human existence itself - from Amzon