T.K. Mahadevan is a wide spectrum writer/editor. Broadcaster of long standing. He wrote this novel-his second-when he was 28 years old. Like everything that he has written over those many years. It is brazenly original and un-inhibited. No reader, howsoever sophisticated, will find it easy to ward off its calculated assault on his set ideas and emotions. Its deliberately syncopated style is of a piece with the author’s known penchant for innovation in the art of verbal communication. When asked to articulate its intended impact on the reader, he once said: “Listen to Richard Strauss’s orchestral work Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration)”. We Die but Once is, a course, not everybody’s cup of tea. But it will strike a resonant chord, withunmistakable clarity, in well-endowed minds which have deeply pondered the never-to-be-resolved mystery of Life and Death and rejected all nostrums, preferring to remain in defeat and despair rather than seek comfort in unfalsifiable dogmas.