Karan Madhok's MONKEY! opens for preorder with Aleph Book Company

NEW DELHI: Writer and editor Karan Madhok has put his new fiction title, MONKEY!, up for preorder with Aleph Book Company. He announced the book on Instagram on 18 September, tagging the New Delhi publisher and pointing readers to the link in his bio.

I have not read MONKEY! yet. I plan to, and I am already impatient for a copy. Madhok's earlier books have a habit of sticking with you, and the little he has shared about this one is enough to make a desk like mine look twice.

What Madhok has said about the story

In his Instagram note, Madhok sketches two strands. The first is set in a picturesque resort town in the Himalayan foothills on a thunderous monsoon day. Amit Nishani, widowed and displaced, works as a hotel manager in what Madhok calls an alien land of deodars, snowy peaks, relentless rain and menacing simians. He meets a Monkey that stares into his soul. "I can see you," it says, "in words outside of language." Amit, Madhok writes, confronts loss, regrets, mortality, and Monkey.

In a parallel world, an unnamed protagonist rides a train with no plan to get off. She sits on the middle berth with her deceased father's jhola, filling pages of an unfinished manuscript among a curious cast of co-passengers. The cover on the announcement is credited to Antra Kay.

Madhok's own website lists MONKEY! as a novella coming soon from Aleph. His Instagram post and the Amazon.in listing both call it a novel. The retailer page lists a hardcover of about 152 pages, ISBN 978-9365230086, and says the title is due around 5 October 2026. Until Aleph posts a dedicated book page, treat that street date as the bookseller's schedule, not a separate publisher bulletin.

From A Beautiful Decay to Ananda, then back to fiction

Madhok is not a first-time name on the Aleph list. His debut novel, A Beautiful Decay, came out with the same publisher in 2022. It follows Vishnu, a young Indian student murdered in a hate crime in Washington, D.C., and then watches the violence that shaped his life on both sides of the Atlantic. The book announced Madhok as a fiction writer willing to sit with ugliness without dressing it up.

Two years later he shifted gear. Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India, published by Aleph in 2024, is a non-fiction road book about ganja in this country: botanical, spiritual, medical, recreational, and legal. Aleph's own page for the book frames it as a lively, researched account that travels from Malana to Kerala and into clinics, temples, and the grey markets around the plant. In 2025, Ananda won the REC-Valley of Words Award for English nonfiction, a detail Madhok carries on his site with some pride, and fairly so.

MONKEY! brings him back to invented characters after that long nonfiction dig. Readers who followed Ananda for the reporting, or A Beautiful Decay for the novel's nerve, now get a shorter form. Calling it a novella on his homepage is useful. It signals length and pace, not a doorstop, and the 152-page hardcover listing fits that shape.

The working life behind the books

Away from the Aleph catalogues, Madhok edits and co-founded The Chakkar, an online journal of Indian arts and culture. He also co-organises the Landour Literature and Arts Festival, with the next edition listed for 26 and 27 September 2026 at Ivy Bank in Landour, and he runs Hoopistani, a long-running blog on Indian basketball. He holds an MFA in creative writing from American University in Washington, D.C., where he won the 2018 Myra Skralew Award for the best MFA thesis in prose.

That mix matters for how his books land. He is a working journalist and festival organiser as much as a novelist. When he writes about cannabis policy or a hate crime in D.C., the voice is not pure campus fiction. When he turns to a monsoon town and a Monkey that speaks without language, you can hear the same curiosity about how people (and other creatures) look at each other.

His short story "Public Record" appeared in Aleph's 2022 anthology A Case of Indian Marvels, edited by David Davidar. That early Aleph link now runs through three solo titles: the debut novel, the cannabis study, and MONKEY!.

Why a New Delhi education desk is watching

Dalimss News covers schools, exams, and universities most days. Book news still belongs on this desk when the writer sits at the crossroads of classrooms, festivals, and public debate. Madhok's Ananda spent time with how India teaches itself about a plant that is both sacred and criminalised. A Beautiful Decay put an Indian student abroad at the centre of a story about belonging. MONKEY!, from the little on offer, plants itself in a hill-station monsoon and asks what happens when something non-human looks back.

I am based in New Delhi, where Aleph is also headquartered at Yusuf Sarai. Preorder season is when a title leaves the writer's hard drive and starts collecting readers. Madhok's Instagram post is that hinge. The cover art on the announcement, with the yellow vertical title and a sketched eye on a dark green field, matches the mood of the teaser: close, watchful, a little unsettled.

I will not review a book I have not opened. What I can say is that I have a preorder in mind, and that I want to know what Amit Nishani does after the Monkey sees him. Hill towns in the rains have a long memory in Indian English fiction. Madhok seems ready to push that memory somewhere stranger.

Until the printed copies arrive, the public record is simple. MONKEY! is Madhok's new fiction with Aleph Book Company. It is available for preorder, with a retailer release window around early October 2026. The author has shared a Himalayan monsoon opening, a train manuscript strand, and a character named Amit Nishani. The rest waits on the page, which is exactly where a reader should meet it.