Way back in July (six months ago!), Reuters did an explainer on why the passage of time felt so weird during the lockdown (it’s a great test — you should try it out). Weeks passed in a blur, and October came after March, yet the days were so long. …

Keeping with tradition, here’s the third instalment of the books that made my 2019. Happy New Year, folks! Black Leopard, Red Wolf — Marlon James I’m yet to finish James’ Booker-winning A History of Seven Killings, but frankly, I was more excited to read this sprawling African lore-fantasy that’s the first part of a trilogy. Drawing on…

British writer John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep series compels Western readers to look beyond Thailand’s beaches and the fetishisation of its sex industry. — Two police officers watch a Mercedes they’ve been surveilling halt by the side of the road. They walk up to it and notice that the doors have been jammed so that those inside cannot escape. When they look inside, they see “an enormous python” wrapped around the neck of an…

With thousands of years of shared histories and 70 years of a cantankerous border between them, India and Pakistan dominate the South Asian subcontinent in all matters, including in literature. ‘South Asian’ fiction prizes such as the following long-list are inevitably dominated by English writing from these two countries, and…

In his 1950 essay, “The Simple Act of Murder”, Raymond Chandler wrote, “The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities…where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.” The popular cosy English country mysteries…

This is the second in a monthly series on crime writers from around the world. It was originally published on Scroll.in. Read more about Ausma and her new novel in the Khattak/Getty series here. Imagine being a Muslim in today’s environment of hate and scapegoating, to hear rhetoric that demonises…

I’ve been writing a monthly column for Scroll.in on crime writers from around the world, and what their fiction tells us about the societies they live in. The first was on Chinese writer Qiu Xiaolong, who is now living in the US. At a point in A Case of Two…

I tried to maintain a books read list for the year, but failed miserably. But it was a pretty good year, filled with some excellent writing. Here’s a thread on some of them: 1/n: Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo was among the best biographies this year. A fascinating study of the renaissance…

I want to talk about two outstanding crime series I read in the last few months: the Inspector Khattak–Rachel Getty mysteries by Canadian author Ausma Zehanat Khan, and the Sam Wydham–‘Surrender-not’ series of historical crime by British writer Abir Mukherjee. In a world where race, ethnicity, and class have begun…