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.
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