For a long time, movement has been regarded as an unqualified good. To leave was to grow; to travel was to expand one’s sense of the wider world; to cross borders was to gain perspective.

However, movement also stretches intimacy across distance, turns presence into something intermittent, and alters familial obligations. Jeet Thayil’s latest book explores this complex terrain — The Elsewhereans is not a celebration of mobility but an attempt to understand its emotional, ethical, and inherited repercussions.

Thayil’s book is, as its subtitle describes, “a documentary novel," a concept that becomes clearer as one progresses through it. This is a family history crafted like a scrapbook, containing fragments, fictions, and collections: letters, photographs, reconstructed dialogues, and archival materials, all revolving around his parents with him in the background.

Dedicated to his mother, who passed away earlier this year, the book aims to articulate a condition created by migration that we have struggled to name; not quite exile, not quite cosmopolitanism, but something Thayil calls being “Elsewherean". It is a way of being formed across cities and continents, inherited as much as chosen, where belonging is distributed rather than anchored.

The narrative assembles itself through these fragments, leaving readers unsure of what truly happened and what has been shaped by the telling, and the author seems uninterested in clarifying that boundary. Early in the epigraph, he quotes Czesław Miłosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished."

This serves both as a warning and methodology, since writing about family is not only remembering it but exposing it, and perhaps more uncomfortably, exposing how one has been shaped by it, revealing that personal choices are often inheritances.

The book populates itself with a diverse array of characters – a drug peddler in Germany, a tour guide in Vietnam, a Franciscan priest, and a woman unhappy in her marriage who........

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