The Snares

A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.

＂Here is, at long last, our immigrant John le Carré. . . . Rav Grewal-Kök is a fearless and visionary writer.＂--Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies

＂Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?＂

In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency--one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination--men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .

Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations--the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes--of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.

Rav Grewal-Kök’s stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence. He grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles. This is his debut novel.