Family Planning

This hugely entertaining modern Indian morality tale is fast-paced and bittersweet in the tradition of Slumdog Millionaire.

Sharp, funny and stylishly assured. Hugely enjoyable

Full of loveable eccentrics and sly social commentary

'Mature and impressive ... a poignant comedy'

Readers of this comedy of manners are in for a treat...Mahajan, with supreme self-assurance, fashions a subtle, cutting take on modern India

One of the best comic novels I've read in years

Karan Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi. A graduate of Stanford University, he now lives in Houston, Texas.

Mr Ahuja, Delhi's Minister of Urban Development, has too much on his hands: thirteen children and another on the way. Lost among his sprawling, noisy brood he reaches out to Arjun, his eldest, and seemingly wisest, son. But Arjun has his own problems: how to tell the girl on the school bus that he's crazy about her? 
 
 
This uproarious debut follows father and son as they blunder their way over and under the flyovers of the megalopolis in a moving - and fast-moving - comic portrait of modern family life.

Karan Mahajan

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout

A superb novel… Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India

Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels

A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity

In Mahajan's riveting, intricate story, the aftershocks of small bombs are as inescapable as their explosions

Engrossing... looks at the after-effects of tragedy from the perspective of the victims, survivors and perpetrators

Wonderful... smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives – about grief, death, violence, politics – I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste... thrilling, tender and tragic... generous without prejudice, which feels at once subversive and refreshing

An utterly brilliant book. Rarely does one encounter a work as masterful in the precision of its writing or as penetrating in the insights it provides. Karan Mahajan is a writer to be admired.

Karan Mahajan’s thoughtful, touching and perfectly pitched account of two marketplace bombings and the casual havoc they cause in a handful of Delhi families is almost subversive in its even-handedness and its charity. For all its unflinching - and unnerving - fatalism, The Association of Small Bombs is an unusually wise, tender, and generous novel.

A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity... he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes... Mahajan hasn’t lost his sharp comic impulses... [Mahajan's] facility for gorgeous turns of phrase produces many passages of vivid, startling power

In this fine novel, Karan Mahajan has achieved a brilliant and distinctive success. The sources, and unbearable, unending, consequences of a terrorist atrocity constitute a subject extremely difficult to capture in a work of serious literature. But with his intelligence, humanity, and art, Mahajan has given us a deep portrait of life in a kind of darkness.

Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and clarity of vision… He is particularly adept at capturing the quicksilver shifts of mood that accompany states of high emotion

Like a Russian novel set in India, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs has the sweep, wisdom and sensibility of the old masters. Here the humor of Bulgakov and the heart of Pasternak deliver an exploded-view of a small bomb that goes off in a minor market in a corner of South Delhi. Like shrapnel, themes of suffering, dislocation and redemption radiate from the blast, and none will be spared Mahajan’s piercing gaze. Urgent and masterful, this novel shows us how bystander, bomber, victim, and survivor will forever share a patch of scorched ground.

Brilliant, troubling...superbly suspenseful... Mr. Mahajan’s writing is acrid and bracing, tightly packed with dissonant imagery... The sharpest passages examine the terrorist mind-set and the demented rationales for mass murder with such acid-etched clarity that it’s possible to feel the deadly magnetism of the arguments... The finest [novel] I’ve read at capturing the seduction and force of the murderous, annihilating illogic that increasingly consumes the globe

A brilliant examination of aftermath, how life is built of consequences, both imagined and unimagined, the tight web of human life and human sympathy. Karen Mahajan knows everyone, on every side of a detonation: the lost, the grieving, the innocent, the guilty, the damaged. It’s hilarious and also devastating. Karan Mahajan is a virtuoso writer, and this is a wonderful book.

Karan Mahajan is daring comfortable readers to make an uncomfortable connection: between the bomb that goes off on the first page of his book, and the way the pages that follow seem to scatter, in bright-hot shards of heartbreaking story. The Association of Small Bombs ... is a work of disabused intelligence, and staggering compassion. ... Mahajan’s sense of fiction as the history behind history puts him in league with Joseph Conrad, and like Conrad he succeeds brilliantly at writing past Empire, by relating the newest of news-cycles to the oldest of tale-cycles.

A powerful novel about one of the defining issues of our age.

At its best, Mahajan’s prose sings with novelty, sensuousness and empathy, keenly alive to many kinds of pleasure.

This is a superb novel… In mimicking the bomb’s structure, Mahajan creates its opposite: a careful, discriminate and moral work of art

A novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. A novel about India that is a novel about the world... A heartbreakingly true and daring novel...that can truly help us understand ourselves, and others, in the dangerous world in which we live

Ask[s] us to consider...lives which rarely find themselves mentioned on the pages of newspapers, let alone in novels

Karan Mahajan's masterful novel explores the aftermath of a small bomb detonation in the '90s in Delhi, and the many people whose lives it alters – from the families of victims to the bombers themselves. With great empathy and no lack of humour, Mahajan shows the multitudinous sides to the kind of story that we usually read a line or two about in a newspaper, or hear short mention of on television

The Association of Small Bombs deftly shifts the reader’s sympathy back and forth between the two men who pull off a relatively insignificant small blast, and the people, sometimes dislikeable, who suffer the consequences. But the moral power of his novel comes from his determination to take individual losses – and choices – seriously, rather than assigning a scale whereby the degree of tragedy is calibrated by high or low body-counts

Karan Mahajan is a writer with great command and acute and original insights. He offers what few can: a stereoscopic view of reality in dark, contemporary times

The Association of Small Bombs is...packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist

A GRANTA BEST YOUNG AMERICAN NOVELIST 2017 
 
When the Khurana boys and their friend Mansoor set out for one of Delhi's markets, disaster strikes without warning. A 'small' bomb detonates, killing the brothers instantly. Mansoor is one of the few survivors. 
 
From India to America, the lives of victims and bystanders, mothers and fathers, comrades and adversaries are changed forever. Even the young bomb maker cannot escape the heat of the blast. 
 
'I can't remember the last time I read a book which conjured a world so rich and so convincing' 
MARK HADDON 
 
'Brilliant... Masterful' 
KEVIN POWERS 
 
'Unusually wise, tender and generous' 
JIM CRACE 
 
'Breathtaking... Unforgettable' 
ADELLE WALDMAN 
 
'Packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist' 
DINAW MENGESTU

Karan Mahajan

Praise for The Association of Small Bombs

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout

A superb novel… Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India

Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout

A superb novel… Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India

Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout

A superb novel… Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India

Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels

Books by Karan Mahajan

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