Paperback editions coming out soon in India and USA!

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

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

Details from: http://www.harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=2575

The Thing About Thugs will be out in French, Italian, Russian and Portuguese (Brazil) in 2012!!

MONTHLY LITERARY COLUMN by Tabish Khair in MINT (Mumbai): http://www.livemint.com/articles/Authors.aspx?author=Tabish%20Khair&type=wa

For further details, see http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=368170

ISBN 978-0-230-23406-2 www.palgrave.com Printed in Great Britain Cover illustration © iStockphoto.com


‘This is a fascinating, diverse and rich book which combines across the Gothic and the postcolonial in its concern with varieties of colonial and imperial Gothic “Other”, at different times, introducing a focus on the “war on terror” as a topical “hook”. Khair places the foreign Other as a central function in the Gothic in texts set both in Britain and the ex-colonies, particularly in the Caribbean, where British influence is revealed as frequently demonic.’ – Gina Wisker, Head of the Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Brighton, UK

'I found this a brilliant and most exciting book.' - David Punter, University of Bristol, in GOTHIC STUDIES 12/2.


Starting with an examination of the role of the colonial/racial Other in mainstream Gothic (colonial) fiction, this book goes on to engage with the problem of narrating the ‘subaltern’ in the post-colonial context. It engages with the problems of representing ‘difference’ in lucid conceptual terms, with much attention to primary texts, and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of colonial discourses as well as postcolonialist attempts to ‘write back’. While providing rich readings of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, Emily Brontë, Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys and others, it offers new perspectives on Otherness, difference and identity, re-examines the role of emotions in literature, and suggests productive ways of engaging with contemporary global and postcolonial issues.

You are visitor number 48269