The Snares

Random House (April 1, 2025)

“Rav Grewal-Kök’s intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages. . . . [T]his 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.” —The New York Times

“In Rav Grewal-Kök’s brilliant and tragic sendoff of the post-9/11 world, a bored bureaucrat is recruited to approve suggested targets for the nascent drone program, and instead finds himself set up as the patsy for a deeply racist and bloodthirsty initiative. If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this.”—LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“At once a gripping political thriller and a tense family drama . . . . [T]he novel asks readers to ponder the conflict between ambition, free will, and morality. It’s a striking and uncompromising meditation on the war on terror’s human cost.”—Publishers Weekly

“The tension never lets up in Grewal-Kök’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-Kök’s wrenching first novel eventually morphs into Kafka redux: there’s no way out, no redemption. It features a startling ending.”—Library Journal

“[A] thrilling debut that grapples with identity and conformity[.]”—Our Culture’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025

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

“The Snares is a pressure cooker of an espionage novel. Grewal-Kök 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 Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker.”—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy

“Like the tormented hero of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Grewal-Kök’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 antihero 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

“Profoundly moving, harrowing, exactingly plotted—you could say Rav Grewal-Kök’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 and The Thin Place