“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

Books by Tabish Khair

The Body by the Shore

The short story “Namaste Trump” starts in a deceptive domestic setting, where a servant from the hinterlands is patronized and exploited by an upwardly mobile urban family. But as the nation celebrates Trump’s visit …

The Body by the Shore

A novel of suspense and intrigue set in the post-pandemic world. Harris Malouf, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, …

Quarantined Sonnets

In this ebook, in powerfully original rewritings that combine humour and satire with acute social and political commentary, Tabish Khair uses William Shakespeare’s sonnets to paint a memorable….

Night of Happiness

Pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms, bothers no one, …

Jihadi Jane

At first glance, Jamilla and Ameena couldn’t be more different. Both are Yorkshire-born teenage girls of South Asian descent, but whereas Jamilla lives with her conservative Muslim family and is quiet, religious and academically …

The New Xenophobia

Xenophobia, the fear or dislike of strangers, can be seen throughout the course of history in the form of communal riots, racist attacks, religious hatred, and genocide. Hindu–Muslim riots in India, Sinhalese–Tamil tensions in Sri Lanka, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, purging of Shias and Sunnis in Iraq …

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the MIssionary Position

“A story that begins with a guy jerking off into a plastic container and ends with a dream, covering that vast terrain between the two with such charming and humane ease that it makes you envy Tabish Khair not just for his writing …

The Thing About Thugs (2010)

“It’s easy to see why The Thing About Thugs was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Crafted through layers of narrative (third and first-person observations from a variety of characters are interspersed with love letters, passages from Captain Meadows’s Notes on a Thug, and newspaper clippings),  …

Filming, a Love Story by Tabish Khair (2007)

Filming…[is]…a multi-narrative that intermixes straight-forward low key story-telling, flashbacks, dream sequences and action shots with admirable elan, unfurling a tale in print that mimics — both in content and in style — the flaming allure of the Indian bioscope …

The Bus Stopped (2004)

“On the surface a book about a bus journey, The Bus Stopped is a novel that reflects deeply into the nature and circumstances of human mobility in our modern, unforgiving world.”

 Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (2012)

A collection of academic papers on the vampire by major scholars, co-edited by Khair.

Contributers include David Punter, Elleke Boehmer, Ken Gelder, Glennis Byron and Justin.

Man of Glass: Poems (2010)

“Drawing subtly upon the past, Khair engages powerfully and movingly with many issues and events, particular and perennial, of vital concern to the reader today: immigration, Afghanistan, terror, love, …

The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (2009)

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 …

Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2005/2006)

Other Routes “opens the reader to a world of alternative traditions to European travel writing and the pieces it contains offer alternatives to the European traveller’s gaze. The editors of this imaginative and broad anthology expand the concept of “travel writing”  …

Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001)

“Tabish Khair’s Babu Fictions (2001) will long be a useful reference point in discussions of subcontinental anglophone fiction, particularly for its insights into alienation, exile and the language question.”

Kaiser Haq in THE DAILY STAR …

 Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000)

“It is heartening to see that while our established poets are getting long in the tooth (or toothless), we have a young Indian poet who may do his country proud in the English-speaking world.”

– Khushwant Singh, in his syndicated column published in various Asian newspapers. …