Indies Introduce Q&A with Vijay Khurana

Vijay Khurana is the author of The Passenger Seat, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and March 2025 Indie Next List pick.

Kim Brock of Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio, served on the bookseller panel that selected Khurana’s book for Indies Introduce.

Brock said of the title, “I was gripping the pages while reading this book. You can feel the tension coming off the page. You know something is going to happen, you’re just not sure what. An interesting look at masculinity and male friendships.”

Editorial Note: One of the main character’s names was changed from Alvin to Adam in final editing. The transcript below has been edited to reflect the change.

Kim Brock: Hi, I'm Kim Brock from Joseph Beth booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I have the pleasure of talking with Vijay Khurana today. How are you, Vijay?

Vijay Khurana: Hey, I'm doing well, thanks, Kim. Thanks for having me.

KB: Of course! His debut book, The Passenger Seat, is coming out in March, and I am so excited. I loved this book. So, let me tell you a little bit about Vijay:

Vijay Khurana is a writer and translator based between Berlin and London. His work has appeared in NOON, The Guardian, The Erotic Review, and The White Review Writing in Translation Anthology. He has an MFA from the University of East Anglia, and is currently completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at Queen Mary University of London. (Impressive!) The Passenger Seat, his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2022 Novel Prize, and it's on sale in the US on March 4.

Welcome again. Vijay.

VK: Thank you. Thanks, Kim.

KB: I love this book, so I want to know more about you. What started you on the path to becoming a writer?

VK: I'm not one of those people who says I knew from age four that I wanted to be a writer. And I'm not one of those people who was writing a novel in their teens or anything like that.

One big thing that happened to me is my school offered German. In high school, I just started learning German, and I liked it, and I was relatively good at it, and I just kept doing it. That ended up meaning that by the time I got to university, I was reading a lot of German writers like Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist, and people who I found to be doing amazing, very unconventional things with stories, as opposed to the stuff that you might be reading in high school. I think that was a big thing for me.

Then I became a radio presenter for a while, but I was always writing stories. I was always sort of trying to write. I remember I had a story published in the university magazine. And through many twists and turns, I did more and more writing as life went on. And now The Passenger Seat is my first novel.

KB: Exciting! So, when you get this great idea, where do you draw your inspiration from?

VK: That's a good question. “Books” is the obvious answer for most writers and most readers. If I'm writing something, even just reading a few lines of something or some poetry, might give me a little idea or a little spark. I feel like I'm quite an oral writer. I like to hear a voice or hear a sentence. I read aloud a lot when I'm writing. Stuff that sounds compelling, or a voice that sounds like it needs to be heard, that's demanding to be heard. I really like reading that, and I try to write that as well.

And then there are other lovely things — what's really the difference between inspiration and just giving yourself a bit of pleasure in life? I like to take the train outside the city and go walking in the woods and things like that. I don't know if that's quite inspiration, but I think it helps everything else.

KB: Yeah, whatever gives you that spark. I think that counts.

VK: Exactly. I know that I was reading a lot when I first started writing The Passenger Seat. I remember reading The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan — it's a British novel, quite a short novel — and The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark — which has a little echo in the title of The Passenger Seat. And a bunch of other stuff. I guess it all comes together in my head and swirls around, and then something comes out.

KB: Along those lines, because it was so unique and just different than anything I'd read before, where did the entire premise of The Passenger Seat come from?

VK: I had been writing a lot of short stories, and I've been really interested in this idea of male friendship. I'd noticed that I was writing a lot of short stories about male friendship, and about how the sexuality of young men can affect their friendship. Even if we're talking about heterosexual men, that masculinity and that sexuality is still influencing the way they relate to each other and the way they relate to the world. Some of those stories had an aspect of violence to them, and I realized I was getting interested in this idea of why men permit violence so often in society. Does the friendship itself have anything to do with that? And if so, what?

Obviously we see this all the time in the news, and there were some real events that happened in North America that I drew from a little in the first part of the book, as well as this question I had. Young men — especially young men — keep doing this sort of thing all the time, by which I mean dehumanizing the people around them — whether it be explicitly violent or not. I was interested in that question, and how it relates to the performance of masculinity, and how it relates to the way friends will play games with each other. Games can lead into competition, and a friendship is a collaboration, but also, in some ways, your friend can be an opponent.

The big thing was realizing that the road trip — which is a big part of this novel — was a perfect storytelling device to use to explore some of these things. I went on some road trips when I was around the same age as Teddy and Adam, the characters in the book, and I have strong memories of them. Obviously nothing like what happens in the novel, but still, there were little aspects of me and my male friends getting along together, working out how to move through the world together, and trying to work out who we were based on how we related to each other.

I found the juxtapositions or paradoxes of the road trip super fascinating, like how the road trip is the whole wide world stretched out in front of you, but at the same time, it's actually really claustrophobic. You're in a small space, in a vehicle next to somebody else, and maybe it's a bit smelly, or maybe you're tired.

KB: Yeah, road trips are like a test of your relationship in a way. Like they always say, if you want to see the strength of your relationship, go on a trip together.

VK: I think what happens in The Passenger Seat is essentially that the relationship kind of fails, or is shown to be really wanting and flawed. That’s what I was trying to get at. There's a moment in the book where a lady says her husband says that people should go on road trips together so that they can have an argument and let out that kind of tension. And so I'm playing with that idea as well — of it being a test.

KB: You feel that tension the whole time you're reading. I'm gripping the book like, “Oh, something is going down!” You just feel it the whole time. You did an excellent, excellent job with that. That was great.

VK: Thank you!

KB: With masculinity being the central theme of this book, you were saying how you looked at different things around the world. How did you go about exploring this theme? Did you do research? Did you look at masculinity in different cultures? How did you prepare for that?

VK: That's a good question. I certainly read a lot. I think one of the things I was drawing on, as I said before, was my own upbringing. My own experiences of being a young man, and the times in which I felt like some of the dynamics that are in the book were happening to people I knew or to groups I was involved in.

I also read a few things that helped me — as well as fiction. There's a book called Between Men by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which I found helpful in terms of the way that male friendships are governed by structures of power. They have a lot to do with women and how the men in this male friendship are actually relating to women outside that dynamic. I found that really interesting. And there's a really old essay by Émile Zola called “The Experimental Novel,” where he talks about putting characters into a laboratory to see what they would do, which I found interesting.

One of the other things I'm trying to do is think about the differences between the two friendships in the book, and to think about the differences between men who we, as society, deem as monstrous or beyond our understanding because they've done something terrible. Then comparing that with the other friendship in the novel which is between two men who, even though they're flawed, we might think of as essentially good men. Is comparing those two in some way helpful to answering the question of why men so often commit violence — as groups, or within relationships and friendships?

I came up with a few questions that I found interesting along the way, and I didn't tell myself that I had to solidly answer them, because I don't think that would make a good novel.

KB: I felt like, as I read it, I kept having more questions. I started to say, “Well, what is masculinity? And what are we teaching young men what masculinity should be?” Because — not giving anything away — I feel like Teddy and Adam had moments where they wanted to be vulnerable with each other, but then they would pull back. Almost like, “But that's not what men are supposed to do.” And in the other relationship, they have points of vulnerability with each other, but it was still like, “But am I allowed to be that way? He's my friend. Can I be that way with him?”

With women, we're just vulnerable [with] each other all the time from day one. I don't think men are allowed that. It would be healthy if men were allowed to be that way.

VK: Absolutely. That kind of intimacy — being vulnerable — is lacking in a lot of these kinds of friendships or relationships that we're talking about.

KB: I thought about the violence too. Why is it so much in men and not in women? When women commit acts of violence, everybody's surprised. You don't usually see women do this sort of thing. But with men, it's almost like, “Oh yeah, he did it. All right.” Why is that acceptable? You gave me a lot to think about!

VK: I'm really glad about that! That's definitely another one of those guiding questions. Why? Why does this just keep happening over and over again? We don't seem to have a way to explain it, let alone talk about changing it.

KB: And why are we not trying to change it? I don't think people are dismissing it, but they're just kind of like, “It's just what it is.” But why? Why are we just accepting it?

VK: I'm not trying to sort of answer any of those questions. I don't think the book gives any neat answers. But maybe the fact that there aren't neat answers is what makes it so hard.

KB: This would be a fantastic book club book, because it'll make people talk. It will generate some of the best conversations, because there’s so much to think about. That’s fantastic.

VK: I hope so! That would make me really happy if it starts conversations between people.

KB: Your book is coming out on March 4 in the US and Canada. Exciting! How will you celebrate your book being published? Because you have to celebrate!

VK: If I have to, then I will! No, I will. I'm part of my way through writing something else at the moment. I also work as a translator, so I feel very busy. But having said that, I am going to celebrate.

I have a couple of readings — unfortunately not in the US or Canada. I have something in London and something in Berlin, so I'll be doing those.

For my birthday last year, someone gave me a really nice bottle of wine, and it's been sitting in the kitchen in our apartment this whole time. I think on March 4, my wife and I will just open that bottle of wine.

KB: There you go! Well, thank you, Vijay. Thank you so much, everyone. The Passenger Seat, March 4. Go get a copy, read it, talk about it — because you're going to want to talk about it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

VK: Thank you very much for having me.

---

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana (Biblioasis, 9781771966306, Paperback Fiction, $17.95) On Sale: 3/4/2025

Find out more about the author at vijaykhurana.com

ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.