The Ramayana has been told for three thousand years. This retelling does not smooth away the difficult parts — it sits with them.

All seven kandas of the Valmiki Ramayana, retold in full: the exile and the forest, the abduction and the search, the war and its aftermath, and the painful Uttara Kanda that most retellings avoid. At every significant moral crossroads — Rama's killing of Vali, Sita's trial by fire, the exile of a pregnant queen — the narrative pauses to examine what has just happened, whose interests are in tension, and what three thousand years of tradition has and has not resolved.

For readers who have always sensed that this story contained more than it was allowed to say.