A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.

“Here is, at long last, our immigrant John le Carré. . . . Rav Grewal-Kök is a fearless and visionary writer.”—Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies

“Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?”

In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and 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. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .

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? The novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.

Rav Grewal-Kök's profile page

Rav Grewal-Kök’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.

“At once a gripping political thriller and a tense family drama, Grewal-Kök’s debut . . . [is] a striking and uncompromising meditation on the war on terror’s human cost.”—Publishers Weekly

“Brilliant and tragic . . . If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this.”—Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 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