Nina McConigley, HOW TO COMMIT A POSTCOLONIAL M**der

Join Nina McConigley, author of the short story collection Cowboys and East Indians, for her debut novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial M**der, a bold, inventive, and fiercely original novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a M**der mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:
f) all of the above.

"I have been waiting for Nina McConigley's debut novel for years and it's even better than I could have imagined." —Celeste Ng

“Spirited and witty, stylish and audacious...Its avid curiosity about the world, its alertness to history, and its enormously fun storytelling—with a twist at the end—held me in their spell.” —Megha Majumdar

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O: Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will have its world premiere in 2026. She has two books forthcoming: her essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press. And her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial M**der, is forthcoming with Pantheon in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University.

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