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WORK TITLE: The Snares
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WEBSITE: https://www.ravgrewalkok.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
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COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor and writer. Fence magazine, fiction editor.
AWARDS:NEA fellowship in prose, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Missouri Review. Contributor of nonfiction writing to numerous publications, including New York Times, Literary Hub, and Los Angeles Times.
SIDELIGHTS
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Rav Grewal-Kök is an editor and writer who grew up in Hong Kong and Canada and is now based in Los Angeles. He is the fiction editor for Fence magazine, and his own short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Ploughshares, and New England Review.
His debut novel, The Snares, tells the story of Neel Chima, a Punjabi American lawyer who is lured by a CIA bureaucrat to join a new federal intelligence agency that surveils domestic terrorism suspects and finds targets for drone assassinations. As Grewal-Kök said in an interview with Author Interviews, the title of the novel is based on a fifteenth-century poem that describes how animals are ensnared by what they most desire. What Neel desires is power and prestige, and his new position takes him further and further away from his wife and two daughters. When he makes a mistake at work, he is thrust into a much more dangerous situation.
Dan Fesperman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Snares both “intriguing” and an “accomplished debut.” Fesperman was particularly impressed with how Grewal-Kök “offers us vivid glimpses” behind the scenes of intelligence work, and he praised the novel’s “icily clean prose.” A reviewer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as a “terrific debut that finds new dimensions in the intelligence thriller.” They praised the “gripping” story where the “tension never lets up.” In Library Journal, David Keymer called the book “wrenching” with a “startling” ending.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2025, review of The Snares.
Library Journal, March, 2025, David Keymer, review of The Snares, p. 94.
New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2025, Dan Fesperman, “Drone Ranger,” review of The Snares, p. 30.
ONLINE
Author Interviews, https://writerinterviews.blogspot.com/ (April 12, 2025), Marshal Zeringue, author interview.
Rav Grewal-Kök website, https://www.ravgrewalkok.com/ (October 17, 2025).
Rav Grewal-Kök’s first novel, The Snares, is published by Random House.
His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Ploughshares, New England Review 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.
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Rav Grewal-Kök
Rav Grewal-Kök’s first novel, The Snares, is published by Random House.
His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence.
Grewal-Kök grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?
My title comes from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translation of a poem by Kabir, the 15th Century north Indian mystic. Kabir tells us that men trap animals by offering them what they most desire (for a bull elephant, a mate; for a monkey, a pot of rice; for a parrot, a bamboo perch). “Beware the snares, says Kabir. / If the ship of Rama comes calling, / Board it at once.”
I’m not religious. But when I read Kabir’s lines for the first time, fourteen years ago, I sensed that they contained a profound truth. Our lusts, hungers, desires entrap us. If we don’t escape our endless wanting through love or art (or the divine)—if we don’t board “the ship of Rama”—we are doomed.
My novel’s protagonist doesn’t heed Kabir’s warning. At the outset he’s a mid-level government lawyer, happily married, with two young daughters. A mysterious CIA bureaucrat takes an interest in him, appeals to his ambition, and offers him something more: rank, power, proximity to the White House. The title tells the reader that traps, not rewards, lie ahead.
What's in a name?
My protagonist’s name is Neel Chima. “Chima” is my mother’s maiden name, and also the name of the Punjabi village where her father spent his childhood, and where he returned for the last twenty years of his life (many Punjabis take their village name as a surname).
Giving my protagonist a name from my own family made him seem more real to me while I was writing the book. I tried to make the world of the book real as well, to justify his presence in it.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?
Difficult question. My teenage self might have been surprised (and worried), by the darkness of The Snares. I write about war, betrayal, moral failure. It’s also a very American novel, and as a teenager I hadn’t lived here and knew little about this country. That might have intrigued my teenage self.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Beginning any piece of writing—novel, essay, story—is difficult. It takes me many attempts to find a plausible rhythm and language. By the time I got to the ending of this book, I was writing very fast, and hardly revising at all. That’s been the pattern for me in shorter pieces as well.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
I see a lot of myself in the protagonist of my novel. Perhaps that’s a damning admission, because Neel Chima is a flawed person who does some very bad things. But he’s also funny at times, and resilient, and capable of love. I think he deserves compassion.
There’s less of me in the secondary characters, and more of other people I’ve known, especially those I’ve disliked!
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
I love movies. I’m sure watching scenes play out on the screen has influenced how I write scenes on the page. I often sketch a room or exterior location and place stick-figure characters on it before I begin writing, so I can keep the physical aspects clear in my own mind.
I sometimes listen to music when I write, especially late at night. Usually I choose jazz from the 50s and 60s: Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, Miles Davis. It helps with the flow, and also makes me feel less lonely.
But everything in one’s life can influence the writing. You cook a chicken for dinner, you hear a siren in the distance—and later that night your characters do as well.
Visit Rav Grewal-Kök's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
''The Snares,'' by Rav Grewal-Kök, examines the perils and moral quandaries of clandestine service.
THE SNARES, by Rav Grewal-Kök
Rav Grewal-Kök's intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages, with coolly precise prose that sneaks nimbly around the periphery of its characters' darkest thoughts and actions. In that sense, you might say that this accomplished debut, ''The Snares,'' 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.
We view this world largely through the eyes of Neel Chima, who, as the son of Punjabi Sikh immigrants, has never felt fully accepted by America even after graduating from an Ivy, serving as a naval officer, marrying a patrician young woman from the Beltway suburbs, and becoming a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice.
As a federal prosecutor, he catches the attention of two mysterious schemers deep within the C.I.A., who see in Neel a bright young man with yearnings and vulnerabilities that might be leveraged to make him do their bidding, even when their plans go beyond the usual moral and legal boundaries of clandestine service.
They engineer his hiring as a deputy director of the Freedom Center, which, with its newness, vague powers and bunkerlike headquarters in Northern Virginia, feels like a fictional version of the National Counterterrorism Center, an agency created in 2004.
The book is set about seven years after 9/11, in the final months of the George W. Bush administration and the first term of President Barack Obama, who, in attempting to establish his toughness against foreign adversaries, liberally employed some of the deadliest tools at his disposal, especially drones.
At the Freedom Center, Neel is expected to assess and identify worthy targets for those strikes. His sponsors' stated goal for Neel -- to build the Freedom Center's influence with the White House by orchestrating high-value killings -- comes with its own emotional costs, which weigh heavily on him from the beginning. But it is their enlistment of Neel in even more sensitive plans -- involving targets on U.S. soil -- that alerts him to the depths of the morass he has entered, especially after they entrap him with a compromising event designed to keep him more firmly under their thumb.
In chronicling Neel's descent, Grewal-Kök offers us vivid glimpses into one room after another of push-button remote warriors, not just the trailers in the Nevada desert where crews pilot drones thousands of miles away, but also the cavernous operations chambers of the Freedom Center, where Neel's commands play out on video screens with horrifying results. Richer still is the author's depiction of rival agencies as they compete for influence, at war with one another as bitterly as with their enemies abroad.
Grewal-Kök's icily clean prose is one of the novel's greatest strengths, yet also its most off-putting feature. While delivering the necessary chill with such precision, at times he holds us at arm's length from his characters. Neel often does the same with everyone in his orbit, including his wife and children, and only heightens this distancing effect. Some of the book's most oddly intimate scenes occur when Neel encounters other dark-skinned players within his world of secrets. In those moments, a code seems to arise organically between them, allowing them to finally speak freely of the hurdles and barriers they have faced since birth.
The ending, arising with a jarring suddenness, feels like a bit of a puzzle -- either a hapless stab at redemption or a surrender posing as resistance. But the chill, at least, is finally gone.
THE SNARES | By Rav Grewal-Kök | Random House | 305 pp. | $29
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Fesperman, Dan. "Drone Ranger." The New York Times Book Review, 18 May 2025, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A840257399/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a54e83a3. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Grewal-Kök, Rav THE SNARES Random House (Fiction None) $29.00 4, 1 ISBN: 9780593446034
The recently appointed deputy director of a new U.S. intelligence agency finds himself swept into the dark corners of anti-terrorism policy--with dire personal and professional consequences.
A deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, Neel Chima is living the good life when he gets a phone call from a mysterious CIA official offering him the job. Neel has a loving wife, two adorable kids, and a house paid for by his rich father-in-law. But the lure of an important post at the Freedom Center, which runs parallel to the CIA in targeting suspected terrorists, is too much to resist. A Punjabi American who has never recovered from being called a dothead by the "fresh-faced white dudes" he served with in the Navy, he is eager to prove himself "as goddamned American" as anyone. After innocents in a Pakistani tribal region are mistakenly killed in a drone attack based on his cold analysis, his superiors convince him it's all part of the job--that "the beauty of war by data is that it takes the moral question out of the discourse." But following an FBI investigation into his drunken mishandling of top security papers during a trip to Thailand, he's secretly pressured into targeting an outspoken young Muslim in Brooklyn and his life begins to implode. Was this all part of a plan? Was he set up as a patsy from the start? The tension never lets up in Grewal-Kök's gripping first novel, which exposes a system that will always compromise its moral code. Neel, who has lived his life coping with his feelings of "otherness" by diminishing his commitment to family and friends, discovers his own moral code too late.
A terrific debut that finds new dimensions in the intelligence thriller.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Grewal-Kok, Rav: THE SNARES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991611/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8da1b02. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Grewal-Kok, Rav. The Snares. Random. Apr. 2025. 320p. ISBN 9780593446034. $29. F
[DEBUT] Punjabi American lawyer Neel Chima leaves the U.S. State Department for a new, shadowy federal intelligence agency called the Freedom Center. His job: deputy director in charge of external operations. His task: fast-track a target for drone attack. He finds it in what he's confident is a terrorist cell in Waziristan, Pakistan. But an investigative journalist discovers that the victims of the strike weren't terrorists at all. Meanwhile, Neel is blackmailed into providing information that leads to the torturous murder of an American Muslim who also isn't a terrorist. Some readers may find this to be a subplot that sits uncomfortably in the narrative. As pressure builds, Neel drinks too much, and his wife leaves him. At a conference in Thailand, he loses documents and lies about it. He's subject to a security investigation, loses his clearance, and is abandoned by his mentor. Neel has always viewed himself as a token Brown man in a white man's world, but he's never felt more isolated than this. Eventually, he commits himself to action, but how? And against whom? VERDICT Grewal-Kok's wrenching first novel eventually morphs into Kafka redux: there's no way out, no redemption. It features a startling ending.--David Keymer
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Source Citation
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Keymer, David. "Grewal-Kok, Rav. The Snares." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, p. 94. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=07abf484. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.