The new US (Houghton Mifflin) edition of THE THING ABOUT THUGS selected as Oprah's 'Book of the Week': "It's hard to know which question you want answered more—both will have you turning pages feverishly. But be warned: If you want a book with a neatly packaged ending, this isn't it. Rather, its elliptical conclusion is proof positive that when it comes to the really big stories, the ones that define who we are, the telling is never over." Read more: http://www.oprah.com/blogs/Books-of-the-Week-The-Pigeon-Pie-Mystery-and-The-Thing-About-Thugs  
  
THE THING ABOUT THUGS: "...a novel full of suspense where the various strands of mystery, human relationships and crime are expertly woven into one absorbing and fast-moving tale. This is a book that deserves to stand the test of time and join the other masterpieces of Victorian London." (Gillian Wright in INDIA TODAY) For details, see http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/109677/Leisure/a-thug-redeemed.html  
  
The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/brieflynoted/2012/10/08/121008crbn_brieflynoted4. Counter Punch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/06/racism-in-london-circa-1830/  
  
Interview on NPR (USA): http://www.npr.org/2012/08/05/158156541/murderous-thugs-from-india-to-london  
  
  
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize, the Hindu Best Fiction Prize and the Man Asian Literary Prize.   
  
  
Amir Ali leaves his village in Bihar to travel to London with an English captain, William Meadows, to whom he narrates the story of his life – the story of a murderous thug. While Meadows tries to analyse the strange cult of the Indian Thug, a group of Englishmen sets out to prove the inherent difference between cultures and people by examining their skulls – with bizarre consequences. Set in Victorian London, this story of different voices from different places draws intricate lines of connection from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, between England and India, across individual and cultural differences.  
  
Known for his refusal to fit his work into established 'diasporic', subalternist or post-colonialist narrative traditions, in The Thing About Thugs, Khair finally engages with these traditions by subtly and ironically deploying echoes from Victorian literature, ranging from Charles Dickens to P.M. Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  
  
'Khair's skill lies in making us question our assumptions about what we do and why we do it.' – New Statesman  
  
The Thing About Thugs is now out in French and Italian!  
  

“The final joy of this magnificently disreputable novel is the realisation that like all great books it has actually been reading you.” – Indra Sinha, author of Animal’s People



Funny and sad, satirical and humane, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position tells the interlinked stories of three unforgettable men –the flamboyant Ravi, the fundamentalist Karim and the unnamed and pragmatic Pakistani narrator –whose trajectories cross in Denmark. As the unnamed narrator copes with his divorce, and Ravi, despite his exterior of sceptical flamboyance falls deeply in love with a beautiful woman who is incapable of responding in kind, Karim–their landlord–goes on with his job as a cab-driver and his regular Friday Quran sessions. But is he going on with something else? Who is Karim? Why does he disappear suddenly at times or receive mysterious phone calls? When a 'terrorist attack' takes place in town, all three men find themselves embroiled in doubt, suspicion and, perhaps, danger. An acerbic commentary on the times, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position is also a bittersweet, spell-binding novel about love and life today.


Just released to critical acclaim in India in the summer of 2012! Forthcoming in USA, Canada and France in late 2013; UK in early 2014!

You are visitor number 64219