The Story of My Assassins

THE STORY OF MY ASSASSINS

Tarun J. Tejpal

"Tarun Tejpal is clever and inventive. In the profoundest way he writes for India" - Nobel Prize Winner V.S. Naipaul

"Deeply humane, raucously funny, dizzy with social and psychological insight! A masterful account of 21st-century ambition, inequality, and power from one of India’s most fearless writers.” - Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo

A Sweeping Saga of Modern India

A sweeping saga of modern India, The Story of My Assassins is gripping from its first sentence: “The morning I learnt I’d been shot I was sitting in my office on the second floor looking out the big glass window…”

Based on actual events, it tells the story 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 would-be murderers – a ragtag group of street thugs and village waifs – and their mastermind. Who wanted him dead, and why?

The investigation forces him to re-examine his own life — to confront his own complex feelings about the country that crafted his would-be killers, as well as himself, his job and his treatment of the women in his life.

Full of dark humour and taut 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 an awesome adventure into the heart of today’s India.

HARDCOVER • 544 PAGES • £17.99 • ISBN 9781612191621 • PUBLISHED 27th SEPTEMBER 2012

EVENTS

Monday 24th September: Foyles Gallery, Charing Cross, WC2H 0EB. 6.30pm, Free Entry.

Tarun will be discussing The Story of My Assassins with Claire Fox, BBC commentator and Director of the Institute of Ideas. For more information please see the Foyles Event Page

Tuesday 25th September: The Frontline Club, Norfolk Place, W2 1QJ 7.00pm, £12.50/£10.00 concessions

A look at Tarun’s work as an investigative journalist within India as the founder of Tehelka, a news organisation that has become renowned globally for its aggressive public interest journalism. He will be in conversation with BBC World's South Asia editor Shahzeb Jillani. For more information and to buy tickets please visit The Frontline Club.

Thursday 27th September: Blackwell’s, 50 Broad Street, OX1 3BQ 7.00pm, £3.00

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Story of My Assassins in Oxford. Tarun will be in conversation about his writing and giving readings from The Story of My Assassins. Tickets cost £3 and can be obtained by telephoning 01865 333623 or visiting the Customer Service Department, Second Floor, Blackwell Bookshop, Oxford. Please see the Blackwell's events page for more information.

Friday 28th September: King's India Institute, King's College London, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS, 12.30pm-2.00pm

Tarun Tejpal will be discussing his new book The Story of My Assassins), fiction-writing and investigative journalism with Ian Jack, former editor of Granta and Associate Faculty, King's India Institute, and Ruvani Ranasinha, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, King’s College London. Please see the event's Facebook page for more information.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tarun J. Tejpal is a journalist, publisher, novelist and founder of Tehelka, one of India’s leading news magazines that is renowned for its aggressive public interest journalism. He has been named one of India’s most influential people by The Guardian, Businessweek and Asiaweek.

Tejpal famously reported for Tehelka on the devastating corruption in India’s defence industry. Floating a fictitious company based in London, the investigation cracked the closely guarded bastion of defence manufacturers and agents, and their military and political patrons, including some of the highest officials in the company. The investigation led to the resignation of the defence minister — and to the death threats that inspired The Story of My Assassins.

A celebrated literary novelist as well as a journalist, Tejpal has won international critical acclaim. His debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, received rave reviews, including in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, and others, and was praised by V.S. Naipaul as “a new and brilliantly original novel from India.” The Alchemy of Desire also won France’s Prix Mille Pages, for foreign literary fiction, and Tejpal’s second novel, The Valley of Masks, was longlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Tejpal’s media enterprises also include book publishing—as the founder of independent publishing house India Ink, Tejpal was responsible for discovering Arundhati Roy and first publishing her Booker Award-winning novel, The God of Small Things. He lives in New Delhi.

Tarun J. Tejpal

TARUN TEJPAL WILL BE VISITING THE UK FROM THE 23rd - 30th SEPTEMBER 2012.

For more information about The Story of My Assassins and Tarun J. Tejpal please contact Jon Purves at jon@turnaround-uk.com or call 020 8829 3010.