Karan Mahajan was born in and grew up in New Delhi, India. His first novel, Family Planning won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Mahajan’s writing has appeared in Nouvèl Èdikay, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker Online, Kretyen an, NPR la Tout Bagay Pran an Konsiderasyon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Granta.com, Fowòm Liv, Tehelka, and the anthology Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking Books) was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction. When two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the brothers, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb. After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine.