India, June 20 -- It's a "conundrum of a novel", says Jeet Thayil, of his new book, The Elsewhereans.

It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding.

The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways.

The reader isn't meant to know which is which. "I want you to wonder. to keep guessing," Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add to the sense of confusion.

A few years on, he enters the tale, born in the backwaters of Kerala, followed by his sister Sheba Thayil (who would...