After working on the novel on-and-off for ten years, Karan Mahajan — associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Literary Arts — released his highly awaited novel, “The Complex,” on Tuesday. The novel was named one of the most anticipated books of 2026 by the Washington Post and was featured in multiple New York Times upcoming book lists.
Set in both India and the United States in the late 20th century, the novel follows the family of the fictional S.P. Chopra, a prominent political figure in India. As the family navigates their future and the political change of the era, they face questions of power, tradition and love.
Mahajan, who moved to the United States from India at 17 years old to attend college and has moved back and forth between the two countries, explained that his immigration experiences helped provide inspiration for the novel.
“I’m interested in the state that many immigrants occupy, which is the state of thinking that you’ll move back, or fantasizing that you move back,” he added. “Immigration is not a linear experience.”
Mahajan said that he wrote the bulk of “The Complex” in 2020, but took a few additional years to “actually chisel it and carve it out.” He added that his student’s ideas help inform his writing process.
He explained that “balancing a lot of different worlds and different materials” while writing the book required significant research. Throughout the process, Mahajan spoke with individuals who immigrated from India during the late 20th century, as well as therapists familiar with the “psychology of different people from that time period.”
Mahajan’s “lively and attentive interest in people — students, especially — comes through in the curiosity and empathy he applies to his writing of fascinating characters,” Kwame Dawes, a professor of literary arts, wrote in an email to The Herald.
His prose is “deft and insightful, but what he manages to do is locate the intimate and emotionally complex lives of his characters in urban India within a broader geopolitical framework,” Dawes wrote. “The effect is engrossing.”
When writing a novel about the past, Mahajan explained that “there’s a tendency to try to inflect the attitudes of that era with our attitudes today. In “The Complex,” he aimed to represent topics such as racism and sexual assault in a manner that kept the attitudes of the time intact.
“Fiction writing is a very instinctive process,” Mahajan said. “It’s not decided by committee. It’s not outlined the way a screenplay is outlined. And so I followed the story where it wanted to go,” he added.
While writing can sometimes stem from “one’s own emotional world,” Mahajan said he often writes about characters with political opinions different from his own.
“I am actually most interested in exploring the ideologies of people who are not like myself, because I know how I feel,” Mahajan explained. “For me, the exploration of these other ways of thinking is really profound, because you can’t really do it anywhere else.”
Matthew Shenoda, a professor and chair of the Department of Literary Arts, described Mahajan as a writer dedicated to “the form of the novel as a site to tease out the most complex, personal and thorny elements of who we are and how we came to be that way.”
“It’s a pleasure and privilege to have a colleague with Karan’s engaged perspective on histories that personalize and deepen our understanding not only of South Asia but of the literary culture of an internally conflicted anglophone world,” John Cayley, professor of literary arts, wrote in an email to The Herald.
In addition to the novel’s political implications, Mahajan said he hopes readers find the novel “funny and entertaining,” adding that he believes the novel “is full of wicked gossip and people doing hilariously bad things.”
Currently, Mahajan is working on several other projects, including three shorter novels and a screenplay. Once his book tour ends in late March, he anticipates that his “life will settle down a bit” and he’ll be able to determine “which one of those projects needs (his) immediate attention.”
Seyla Fernandez is a senior staff writer covering faculty.
