Tarun Tejpal — The Story of My Assassins

Join journalist, publisher and novelist Tarun Tejpal in conversation about his latest book, the highly acclaimed The Story of My Assassins. Followed by a book sale and signing.
Inspired by actual events, The Story of My Assassins 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, 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?
But the investigation forces him to reexamine his own life, too — 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.
Part thriller and part erotic romance, full of dark humor and taut suspense, The Story of My Assassins takes us from the lavish, hedonistic palaces of India’s elite to its seediest slums.
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 defense industry. The investigation led to the resignation of the defense 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.
“Tarun Tejpal is clever and inventive. In the profoundest way he writes for India.” - V.S. Naipaul