.webp)
Releasing this Diwali, The Liar Among Us blends a boarding-school mystery with North-Eastern myths, and plans to launch a unique school program that tackles truth, pressure, and mental health.
New Delhi, India (September 19, 2025) : For years, Indian YA shelves have overflowed with imported
monsters and borrowed mythologies. With The Liar Among Us
(published by Bloomsbury and represented by Preeti Chaturvedi’s The Sunflower
Seeds), author Bishhal Paull, born and raised in Guwahati, turns the lens
toward home: a fictional elite boarding school in the Sikkim valleys where
secrets, politics, and folklore collide. The book has been touted as “India’s
answer to Stranger Things,” by early readers, but Paull’s universe is
unmistakably its own. Steeped in Himalayan stories and the moral questions
teenagers wrestle with every day.
Set in
Valorhouse International in the fictional town of Labak, Sikkim, the novel
follows students who navigate ambition, loyalty, and fear while a darker
current, drawn from regional lore, rises around them. There are Golden Shields
for excellence and Black Shields for misconduct, a tantalizing system that
makes every choice count. Whispered names like Baka (a malignant force),
Sudrika (a protective deity), Fogfriends (playful, uncanny presences), give the
world both wonder and dread. The mystery revels in twists, but it’s the tension
between truth and lie, courage and conformity, that gives the story its
heartbeat.
“I
wanted a thriller that feels bingeable,” says Paull, “but I also wanted it to
smell of pine and promise, to carry our songs and superstitions, for it to sound
like home.”
The Author Behind the Myth
Paull isn’t
the typical debutant. A well-known marketing wizard behind blockbuster
bollywood films by the day and a “people’s archivist,” by the night. He has
spent years collecting stories—family whispers, roadside legends, forgotten
lullabies, and translating them into living, contemporary narratives. That
duality of data-sharp strategies and memory-driven storytelling, animates his
book and the way he plans to bring it to readers.
“Teens don’t
want lectures,” he says. “They want to experiment, to question, to make
choices. I’m here to give them an arena.”
Beyond Readings: A School Program That Matters
Beginning
November 2025, Paull is set to start his extensive book tour in India and
select international markets wherein he will visit schools with a set of
interactive, classroom-friendly experiences. Away from long readings, and
boring book signings. Each module ties back to the novel while addressing real
pressures faced by teenagers today. These include folklore therapy sessions,
improv storytelling gigs, theatrical debates, rumours to bestsellers writing
labs and lots more. Schools from across the country are making a beeline to
sign him up for these sessions which are soon scheduled to kickstart.
For Bishhal,
these are not mere add-ons. They are his main focus campaign. As every visit
leaves behind artifacts—student-designed shields, gallery walls, short
performance clips. So much so that the event continues to live in the school
community long after the bell rings.
Why It Feels New
Most YA
campaigns push characters. Paull pushes participation. Instead of telling
teenagers what a book “means,” he turns meaning into interactions. The approach
repositions the author from a visiting lecturer to an experience designer; a
shift that could influence how Indian YA launches are run in the near future.
It also marks
a rare mainstream platform for North-Eastern storytelling. Paull’s references
aren’t pasted from global pop culture; they’re gathered from the region’s oral
traditions, landscapes, and everyday speech. That texture changes the air of
the book, from less theme park, more living ecosystem.
“Representation
isn’t a bullet point,” Paull notes. “It’s a cadence on how a place breathes on
the page.”
The Bigger Conversation
The Liar
Among Us speaks to something teenagers recognize instinctively: we curate
ourselves online and off, we perform to fit, and the line between honesty and
survival is blurry. The book doesn’t wag a finger. It asks: What do we owe each
other when nobody’s watching? That question travels well, from school corridors
to dinner tables to creator communities that will help amplify the release.
Expect
collaborations with BookTok/Bookstagram voices, classroom-ready micro-prompts,
and shareable artifacts from the school labs. The aesthetic, hinted at in
campaign art with thangka-inspired motifs, keeps the visuals rooted even as the
story reaches outward.
What’s Next
Paull hints
that the seeds for Book 2 are already planted inside the first. The clues, he
says, are “in plain sight, just not where you’re looking.” For now, the aim is
simpler: help a generation of Indian teens see themselves in a mythic mirror
that finally reflects home.
The Liar Among Us officially hits shelves on October 14,
2025.