The Things About Thugs

‘A novel full of suspense where the various strands of mystery, human relationships and crime are expertly woven into one absorbing and fast-moving tale. This book deserves to stand the test of time and join the other masterpieces of Victorian London’-India Today 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 races by examining their skulls – with bizarre consequences. Set in Victorian London, this story of different voices from different places draws intricate lines of connection from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, between England and India, across individual and cultural differences. Known for his refusal to fit his work into established ‘diasporic’, subalternist or postcolonialist 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.