**OUT IN PAPERBACK**

Category: Fiction

Publisher (Indian subcontinent): HarperCollins Publishers India

Siyahi is also representing this title in other regions, of which some are still available

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.

A novel set in early Victorian London, teeming with unforgettable characters and full of narrative tension, of tragedy and irony as well as humour and hope. It manages to make the Victorian past reflect of current ‘War on Terror’ concerns, drawing intricate lines of connection from the 19th to the 21st 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.