Shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Literary Awards 2026

"This taut, terrific novel — Khurana’s debut — ratchets up the tension in a classic formula: A couple of restless young men on a wilderness road trip, rifle in tow, test the bonds of their tentative friendship and learn more than they anticipated about manhood, violence and the consequences of poor impulse control. Khurana’s sinuous prose zips right along, taking us inside the minds of both friends to illuminate their distinct ambitions and insecurities, before swerving into a surprising and graceful finish. I’ve been recommending it for months to anybody who likes Richard Ford and Andre Dubus III." Gregory Cowles, Books of the Year, New York Times

"Think In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists." The Tyee

"Where hit UK TV show Adolescence illuminated the myriad societal failures that are driving young boys to violence, this outstanding debut takes us inside the darkest and most vulnerable parts of their minds." The Guardian

A striking debut novel from a British Indian Australian living in Berlin, THE PASSENGER SEAT was Runner-Up in the Fitzcarraldo/New Directions/Giramondo Novel Prize. It is an unsettling, riveting portrait of how men learn to be male by being with and performing for other men, for good and for ill. It has a pair of wannabe rebel teens, Adam and Teddy, impulsively fleeing their over-familiar, under-powered small-town existence to drive a car north and then further north on the American continent, with no particular place to go, and no particular sense of who is at the wheel. Their relationship fluctuates as much as their emotions and their intentions; they drive more or less deliberately into a ditch out of which they cannot readily escape. The father-figures in their families have been no kind of role model. Their story has a growling horsepower all its own. It rumbles, roars and squeals. And then it careens off the edge, leaving behind a masculinity that is quieter and more melancholy but no less haunting.

'A truly marvellous novel' The Age

'The Passenger Seat is so good it makes me angry. It has four main characters: two young Canadian men, a truck, and a gun. I found myself telling people it felt like a movie, but I hate movies and loved The Passenger Seat. So I amend: it felt like the kind of movie I like, which is the movie Dog Day Afternoon. Though there is enough action in The Passenger Seat to penetrate even the vulcanized mind of a studio executive, it’s the language that made me swoon and screenshoot.' Kate Riley, Granta.com

'The Passenger Seat is a perfectly paced and intensely compelling read, an unforgiving, disturbing tale that resists any explanation, as Khurana consdiers the darkness of violence with a steely calm that refuses to let us look away.' The Saturday Paper

'Vijay Khurana’s quietly frightening debut... evokes Camus’s “The Stranger,” though the malaise that leads to them is connected to contemporary crises in masculinity... The book’s unknowns conjure a deep disturbance in the condition of male friendship.' Wall Street Journal

'The setup is bare-bones: two teenagers, a borrowed car, a long quiet road. But the dread ratchets up with every kilometre. Former Triple J presenter Vijay Khurana’s debut novel is magnificently unnerving: the violence ambient, the loneliness immense; a razor-sharp study of adolescence at a moment when we don’t know what we expect boys to become, or how. “Teddy is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood,” Khurana writes of the kid riding shotgun, “but he has not yet settled on an alternative. He is shopping for shortcuts”. So are we. That’s the deep terror of this book. And its tenderness.' Beejay Silcox, Best Australian Books of 2025, The Guardian

'Nuanced, propulsive, literary, unsettling, haunting' The Globe & Mail

‘This is the opposite of a “promising” first novel, if “promising” suggests an implicit but unfulfilled talent. “The Passenger Seat” is structurally ingenious, rendered in unusual and fine colors, buffed to a shine. A perfect debut novel, explicit in its excellence!

The plot involves a pair of disturbing teenage boys who set out on a road trip through the Canadian wilderness, but if you’re not grabbed by the above nouns, I would still encourage you to seek out the book, as it handles topics of universal interest — identity formation, alienation, power, loneliness — with daunting originality. Unlike a lot of so-called psychological thrillers, it is psychologically thrilling.

Khurana is also very good on adolescent friendship, capturing the way that young people can unwillingly influence each other/merge personalities at precisely the moment they are trying to become discrete selves.

Read if you like: Denis Johnson, the curious phenomenon that is the ‘manosphere’, Charles Willeford, driving.’ Molly Young, New York Times

‘Vijay Khurana handles the tension with mastery. In his hands, performative masculinity gives way to a cruelty that is reasonless, but never meaningless.’ Readings Monthly

‘Khurana explores subtly the power dynamics at play as the boys search for certainty; yet, as their drive continues, further from civilization and quotidian concerns such as food and family, logic and morality start to disintegrate… Both are seeking the excitement of the unknown, fleeing their futures and the “fakeness”… As the boys drive further into the wilds, the narrative accelerates and the plot darkens… This is masterly storytelling – tense, poetic – as Khurana teases apart the psychology of nascent masculinity. Cliched motives are eschewed, as is easy moralizing. The real brilliance of this novel lies in its ambiguity.’ Times Literary Supplement

'A startling road trip as original as it is timely... This is as strong an Australian debut as I’ve read in years: confident, precise and simmering with intellectual energy. The Passenger Seat flirts with allegory but never renounces an urgent relationship to contemporary configurations of masculinity. Young men like Teddy and Adam are the subject of relentless public fascination. They are the guys who listen to Joe Rogan, watch Andrew Tate, read Jordan Peterson and voted for Donald Trump. Khurana grants Teddy and Adam their measure of humanity, but not redemption. ' Guardian Australia

'The most riveting book I read this year was The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana... Khurana’s glass-cut, rhythmic sentences plunge you into a world of obsessive friendship and insecurity, a game of one-upmanship that feels eerie in its innocence.' Books of the Year, London Magazine

'While some may find Khurana’s attempt to humanize these characters distasteful, his ability to get under their skins allows uncommon access to the inner worlds of the kind of men that appear so frequently while the bulk of society tries in vain to understand what motivates them or to identify the specific social forces that created them.' Shakespearean Rag

'Khurana, with his loupe-like insights and unforced prose, seamlessly captures Teddy as he navigates—and fails to navigate—the constant tension between passivity and intentionality.... This grating dynamic of contestation and acquiescence, unspoken competitiveness and cowardly companionship—thoroughly embedded in many male friendships, but also apparent in relationships writ large—is what makes Khurana’s novel so damningly arresting.' Tournament of Books