The Story of My Assassins: A Novel - Softcover

"Spine chilling ... written with flair and clear-eyed acidity." --The New Yorker

"Tejpal writes with splendid élan: His novel is a stylish, erudite potboiler that reads like a mix of Alexandre Dumas and India's ancient national epic, the Mahabharata ... exhilarating." --SAM SACKS, The Wall Street Journal

"Takes us into the unexplored depths of Indian life ... brilliantly evoked." --The Independent

"Tejpal's masterful newest... is an epic tale of modern-day India." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Tarun J. Tejpal is brilliant. A master storyteller, he writes with graphic detail so stunning in spots as to make the reader pause for breath." --New York Journal of Books

"Clever ... inventive ... In the profoundest way, Tarun Tejpal writes for India." --V.S. NAIPAUL, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"Sets a new and formidably high standard in Indian writing in English." --PANKAJ MISHRA

When a journalist decides to investigate his would-be killers, his shocking findings provide an absorbing story of modern India

Based on actual events, The Story of My Assassins tells the saga of a journalist who learns that the police have captured five hitmen on their way to kill him. Landing like a bombshell on his comfortable life, just as he's started a steamy affair with a brilliant woman, the news prompts him to launch an urgent investigation into the lives of his aspiring murderers—a ragtag group of street
thugs and village waifs—and their mastermind. Who wanted him dead, and why?

But the investigation forces him to reexamine his own life, too—to confront his own notion of himself, as well as his complex feelings about the country that crafted his would-be killers.

Part thriller and part erotic romance, full of dark humor and knife-edged suspense, The Story of My Assassins is a piercing literary novel that takes us from the lavish, hedonistic palaces of India's elite to its seediest slums. It is a novel of corruption, passion, power, and ambition; of extreme poverty and obscene wealth. It is a gripping adventure into the heart of today's India.