In the ever-intertwined corridors of fiction and foreign policy, Fazle Chowdhury has long been a quiet but potent voice—a storyteller of war-haunted landscapes, of shadows, dark forces, betrayals dressed in policy, and of love lost at the fault lines of identity and ideology. Now, he returns with the ghosts of a time, names, and notions that have both shaped the modern world.
His upcoming collection of 25 short stories, Tales From Another Time, set to release on February 14, 2026, is not merely a fictional account—it is a literary mosaic of chronicles set across four continents, from India to Iraq, Afghanistan to America. In Chowdhury’s mind, the map of the world becomes a palimpsest of memory, regret, espionage, and emotion.
Written over three years, these stories explore themes that have long lived in his mind—escapes from death, betrayals, the pain of farewells, and the bittersweet aftermath of love of places like London, Paris and a version of New York that feels more alien now than before.
It is a complicated road where it is hard to see where this collection of works finds its fuel. Chowdhury, who has lived and worked across the geopolitical arc he writes about, folds personal geography into narrative fiction. These stories, he insists, are not memoir—but something older and perhaps more urgent. “They’ve festered in my mind for more than twenty years,” he says. “Recent events have forced me to confront a thing called mortality. That’s the root of these tales.”
One of the stories revisits a boarding school in the lush, rule-bound hills of southern India, where two former students return decades later—only to find their sons implicated in the same infractions they committed 30 years prior. Regret ripples through the corridors, but so does a lingering, unspoken love—one that might have changed a life had mistakes of youth not intervened. The twist? One of the fathers is a spy who is coordinating a daring escape of a scientist, in a besieged capital not too far away.
Another story centers on a trio of fiery university American students protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But as their movement begins to unravel, so do their strengths. One of them, disillusioned but charismatic, is quietly recruited by an intelligence agency. The reader is left to question: how youth is infected by mostly bad alternatives when things don’t go their way.
Perhaps the most haunting of Chowdhury’s new offerings is a love story that spirals into a war zone. An Iraqi woman, educated in an American university, disappears without a trace. Years later, an army contractor, wanting to find her, arranges a transfer to a location near Sadr city —a corridor of death. What he finds instead may change everything.
These are stories of periods in flux and identities in fragments. But they are also deeply personal. The characters stumble through their moments, just as Chowdhury’s own work often dances on the blurry line between the fictional and the confessional. They love in languages not their own, grieve in silence, fight wars they don’t understand, and make choices that reverberate decades later.
Unlike Chowdhury’s earlier novels—The Other Side of Eden, Never Among Equals, or Finding Alexey—Tales From Another Time leans more heavily into short form and, uncharacteristically, into the realm of almost entirely espionage. But this isn’t a Bond-like universe of gadgets and tuxedos. It’s something grittier and more psychological. These spies cry, bleed, and live but are dying inside.
Still, Chowdhury doesn’t abandon the core. A handful of stories evoke the muscular narrative force of some draped in spiritual inquiry, absurdity, sometimes even funny, others, tragically, in the shell shock of human tragedies. The characters are not just products of conflict—they are narrators of it. And through them, Chowdhury offers a glimpse into a world unknown.
These stories arrive at a moment of global re-evaluation. As borders harden, identities surface, friendships polarize, and trust dissolves, Chowdhury’s fiction is a unicorn type of something which humanizes. It listens. It asks —and rarely settles for easy answers.
Chowdhury does aim to reveal what those crises leave behind: memories, misunderstandings, and a menace that is evolving into something uncontrollable. Just as men, women and children try to salvage their truths in the aftermath.
Whether set in a university in America, a London court, a German corporate office or a southern French villa, or the battle-scarred streets of Afghanistan or Iraq, each story is a thread in a larger tapestry—woven from the fabric of fractured worlds, stitched with hope.
Tales From Another Time by Fazle Chowdhury will be available on 14 February 2026.
