New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- Jeet Thayil's new book The Elsewhereans has been published as fiction, but it defies neat generic classifications. With its moorings in memoir, biography, travelogue, photography and history, it is at once an impulsive creature as well as recognisably part of an august literary tradition, heralded by writers like W.G. Sebald and J.M. Coetzee, among others, who dissolved the line between fact and fiction in their work. The style of these writers has inspired epithets like "facto-fiction" or "ficto-fact", both of which accurately describe the affinities of the story Thayil tells us in this book.

At its core, The Elsewhereans is Thayil's take on his parents' life: T.J.S. George, a distinguished journalist with multiple ...