Essays & Reviews

On culture, identity, family and home: Delhi, Punjab, Indonesia, and what’s in between

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Columns

From my life in India, China, and Germany: politics, fatherhood, crime, sexuality, the media…

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Travel

Vietnam, Jakarta, Prague, Portugal, New Zealand: a selection from years of wandering

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Books

Set across the Asian megacities of Delhi, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Beijing during Covid’s brutal Delta wave, this is a novel about finding love, freedom, and human connection in the bleakest of times. Lies are stripped away and deceptions revealed. Everyone must look in the mirror when the time comes and know truth from artifice.

Set in a German forest as Covid begins, Into the Forest follows a group of women navigating friendship and isolation as they contend with disappearances, lies, and what could only be a murder. This spare, atmospheric novel is about loneliness, migration, and belonging, and how a time of great stress is both brake and accelerant to people finding each other.

Vampires and werewolves, poetry, the police investigating a series of crimes, and a woman who may be centuries old: Necropolis is all this and more. Combining elements of fantasy, crime, and noir, it tackles questions of class, ownership, and origin, taking you to the heart of what it means to live in New Delhi in the 21 st century.

A young man chronicles his life in Mumbai, India’s “only real city”, as a new millennium approaches. A literary agent searches for him by meeting the people he has written about. Set in just one day, this novel locates friendships, loves, and lives in a frenzied yet measured traverse of that huge city.

Praise

“Nekropolis” ist eine märchenhafte Krimi-Fantasie, in der die detektivischen Ermittlungen immer wieder in fremde Zeiten hineinspielen.

Fritz Göttler

Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Necropolis” is a grisly, wonderfully written novel that interweaves disparate genres and styles into a whole that satisfies thoroughly.

Scott Phillips

Author of "The Ice Harvest" 

“Into the Forest” is an elegant, meditative novel that reminds us there are fewer illnesses as destructive as that of human negligence and violence.

Sayari Debnath

Scroll

Avtar Singh’s Necropolis is an ode to ancient, medieval and Old Delhi, a romantic ballad that cuts across time, if not place, and melds features of classic detective fiction with those of the hard-boiled and roman noir in a style that is exquisitely the author’s.

Giti Chandra

Biblio