"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. It rides out to territory somewhere between TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and Muriel Spark’s THE DRIVER’S SEAT or Andrea Arnold’s AMERICAN HONEY. And then it careens off the edge, leaving behind a masculinity that is quieter and more melancholy but no less haunting.

Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape and Oval, has said of the novel: “Vijay Khurana's profound and propulsive The Passenger Seat is a thrilling, terrifying, devastating ride. This perfectly pitched tale of masculinity gone wrong exposes the ways that intimacy can so quickly veer into violence—yet it evades easy moral pronouncements at every turn. Khurana is a brilliant stylist who drives straight toward the heart. I would follow him down any road.”

'A truly marvellous novel' The Age

'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

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

‘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

'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