Karan Mahajan Returns With Sweeping Family Epic ‘The Complex’
India-West Staff Reporter
NEW YORK, NY – Karan Mahajan’s return to fiction has been nearly a decade in the making, and his new novel ‘The Complex’, arriving from Viking on March 10, 2026, signals not just a comeback but an expansion of his storytelling reach. Mahajan has long been known for fiction that blends political insight with emotional depth, and his latest work draws directly from the worlds that have shaped him: India in the throes of upheaval, the Indian American experience, and the quiet storms that gather inside families.
Mahajan entered the literary world with ‘Family Planning’ in 2008, a debut that drew attention for its sharp humor and restless energy. By the time he published ‘The Association of Small Bombs’ in 2016, he had become a central voice in contemporary American fiction. That novel was a finalist for the National Book Award, earned a spot on the New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year, and collected honors from the New York Public Library, the Anisfield Wolf Awards, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Now, after years of teaching, reporting, and thinking deeply about the forces that shape societies, he turns to a story that unfolds across India and the United States with the breadth of a classic family chronicle.
‘The Complex’ begins in the sprawling Delhi residence of S P Chopra, a political strategist whose influence lingers over his descendants long after the country he once helped steer begins to shift under their feet. As India enters the late nineteen seventies and eighties, the Chopras find themselves moving with and against these changes. Their home, crowded with ambition and resentment, becomes a microcosm of the nation outside its gates.
Mahajan traces the splinters that develop within the family with the same precision he once applied to the aftermath of political violence. Sachin Chopra, determined to carve out an independent life, leaves for America with his wife Gita. But the shadow of home follows them, especially when Gita becomes entangled in the unsettling attention of Sachin’s uncle, Laxman. Laxman’s political rise through an emerging Hindu nationalist movement exposes him to moral compromise after moral compromise, a descent that echoes the turbulence of the era.
In Delhi, Vibha, Laxman’s sister, fights a losing battle to keep the family from breaking apart, even as buried grievances and hidden betrayals tighten their grip on the Chopras. Through these intersecting lives, Mahajan examines the weight of inheritance and the ways in which personal choices reverberate across continents.
What makes ‘The Complex’ feel unmistakably like a Mahajan novel is the interplay between individual longing and sweeping historical shifts. His characters strive, falter, and collide with one another while the world changes around them, and the result is a portrait of India and its diaspora that feels both lived and alive. Early readers have responded with enthusiasm. Karen Russell calls the novel an extraordinary gift, while Vauhini Vara says it is Mahajan’s most exciting and virtuosic work yet.
Mahajan, named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, now teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books, always reflecting his keen eye for the pressures that shape modern life.
