The Snares Rav Grewal-Koek 9781835012925

'Rav Grewal-Koek's intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages, with coolly precise prose that sneaks nimbly around the periphery of its characters' darkest thoughts and actions' New York Times

An eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.

While America is still reeling from the events of September 11th, Neel Chima is recruited into a new, ruthless federal intelligence agency - eager to seek revenge for their recent tragedy.

Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in 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.

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?

Rav Grewal-Koek's stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, New England Review, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, 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. The Snares is his first novel.

'Here is, at long last, our immigrant John le Carre. The Snares is a propulsive thriller that dives into our technological chaos, political deceptions, and transnational identities with fierce intelligence and wit. Rav Grewal-Koek is a fearless and visionary writer.' - Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies

'Profoundly moving, harrowing, exactingly plotted-you could say Rav Grewal-Koek's debut novel is pure literary thriller. You could also say The Snares is the chilling portrait of one man's encounter with fate, an encounter which, like any encounter with fate, produces that thrill, that shiver between the shoulder blades Nabokov calls 'the highest form of emotion humanity has attained when evolving pure art.' - Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex

'The Snares is a pressure-cooker of an espionage novel. Grewal-Koek takes us into the dark underbelly of the post 9/11 war on terror in a way I've never experienced before-and have been unnerved by ever since.'

-Graham Moore, author of The Wealth of Shadows and The Last Days of Night

'Taut, morally complex, and unforgettable, The Snares is an electrifying literary spy thriller on par with Native Speaker.'

-Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy

'Like the tormented hero of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Grewal- Koek's Punjabi lawyer turned intelligence officer finds himself ensnared in the machinery of the War on Terror. Lurching from a state of innocence to a terrible state of complicity-a complicity created in part by his own ambition-he becomes for us a new kind of anti-hero within the modern espionage novel. Although the novel is set in the recent past, it could just as well be a hideous road map for the future.'

-Lawrence Osborne, author of On Java Road and The Ballad of a Small Player

'The tension never lets up in Grewal-Koek's gripping first novel, which exposes a system that will always compromise its moral code. . . A terrific debut that finds new dimensions in the intelligence thriller.'

-Kirkus Reviews

'Grewal-Koek's wrenching first novel. . . morphs into Kafka redux: there's no way out, no redemption. It features a startling ending.'

-Library Journal

'Brilliant and tragic. . . If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this. 'LitHub', Most Anticipated Books of 2025

'At once a gripping political thriller and a tense family drama, Grewal-Koek's debut . . . is a striking and uncompromising meditation on the war on terror's human cost. Publishers Weekly

'...this accomplished debut has adopted the techniques of the world it depicts - a realm of shadowy intelligence dominions where even the deadliest actions are carried out with calm detachment' New York Times