Avtar Singh’s “Into the Forest” and “The Pretenders”
Avtar Singh is an internationally published author and magazine editor. He was the founding editor of Time Out Delhi and was most recently managing editor of The Indian Quarterly. He has twenty years of experience editing magazines engaged with arts and literature, entertainment, food, travel and fiction. Recent fiction credits include the short story ‘A Scandal in Punjab’ in The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction (2024), and ‘The Corpse Bearer’ in Subnivean.org (shortlisted for the Subnivean prize 2023). Recent non-fiction credits include work in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Nikkei Asian Review, India Today and Biblio. He was a summer fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 2018. His last novel, Necropolis, about crime, poetry and a woman who may be centuries-old (HarperCollins India and Akashic Press, US, 2014), was translated into German as Nekroplis. His first novel was The Beauty of These Present Things (Penguin India, 2000). Among other print credits, his work has been collected in Mumbai Noir, Civil Lines and the essay volume Pilgrim’s India. He has written for GQ, Cosmopolitan and other prestigious publications. He has lived and worked in India, the US and China, and is now based in Germany.
In less than a year, he has published two novels. Into the Forest (2024, Westland Books) and The Pretenders (2025, Simon and Schuster India).
INTO THE FOREST, AN EXQUISITELY WRITTEN, HARD-TO-DEFINE NOVEL, IS AS MUCH A MEDITATION ON THE HUMAN RELATIONSHIP TO NON-HUMAN LIFE AS IT IS A LOOK AT THE PUSH AND PULL OF GENDER, CLASS AND RACE IN OUR SOCIETIES.
‘Why do you want to know about what happened, bhai?’
The older man mentions a paper in the UK that may be interested in what happened to Nabi. Its politics are impeccable. His story will resonate there.
Nabi looks unconvinced.
‘People must know our stories,’ says the reporter.
‘Why? What good does it do?’
There are three disappearances; they could all be ‘crimes’, but only one of them ends up in murder. Germany, with its unique fractures, is the perfect setting. This story could only be about women. Yet, this is also a novel about the human condition anywhere, everywhere.
Into the Forest is about loneliness and isolation, migration and belonging. It is also about how times of great stress are both brake and accelerant to human connection.
Shamsher Singh (Sammy to his friends) watches a man carry a corpse around Delhi, looking for a place to cremate the body with dignity. Sammy’s is a privileged life, yet the sickness has ripped open all the insecurities and anxieties of his past. In Beijing, Mei must come to terms both with her stepfather’s demands and her long-distance relationship with Farid, Shamsher Singh’s young “nephew”. Changez Khan finds kindness from an unexpected quarter in Bangkok, but his own ghosts carry an intolerable weight. In Jakarta, Nina, Mei’s mother, must overcome her husband’s paranoia and her own isolation. As death steps ever closer, lies are exposed and deceptions unraveled. But there is always hope.
Set across Asia at the peak of the brutal Delta wave, The Pretenders is a novel about finding love, freedom, and human connection in the bleakest of times. In Delhi’s sprawling homes, in the cramped quarters of the staff that keep them running, in the loneliness of Bangkok’s streets, The Pretenders takes one to the heart of what it means to be human when life itself is in the balance. Policemen and predators, the privileged and the under-privileged, masters and servants: everyone must look in the mirror when the time comes and know truth from artifice.
17 Sept 2025
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