Johal, Gurnaik
Entry updated 26 January 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1998- ) UK author, active from around 2020; the tales assembled in his first collection, We Move (coll 2022), convey essentially nonfantastic narrative through complex devices – including multiple narrative lines delivered with apothegmatic concision – that hint towards a wider gaze (see Fantastika). This is provided in his first novel, Saraswati (2025), much of it set in the Near Future Punjab, on the Indian side. A dry well mysteriously fills with water, which may have possibly been a Climate Change consequence of glacier-melt in the Himalayas; but the water does not stop, and the titular river, which nourished an historical namesake civilization 5,000 years earlier, flows through the tale.
The tumbled world depicted in Saraswati, with many characters featured in several sections set many years earlier than the engendering event, is made relatively coherent through the late arrival of a first-person narrator, and the unfolding revelation that all the main figures in the novel are rhizome-like shoots into diaspora of a single quasi-secret nineteenth century marriage; other tales with similar strategies of procreative linking, whether the main action is of scattering or gathering, include Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), John Crowley's Little, Big (1981). There are survivors at the end. [JC]
Gurnaik Singh Johal
born London: 1998
works
- Saraswati (London: Serpent's Tail, 2025) [hb/]
collections and stories
- We Move (London: Serpent's Tail, 2022) [coll: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry