In a break from his usual political analysis, current affairs writer Fazle Chowdhury has ventured into the realm of fiction with his new collection “Tales from Another Time.” The compilation features 25 short stories that challenge readers to question the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
Fazle Chowdhury, best known for his non-fiction books on Ukraine, is set to release a new collection of short stories next spring—his second work of published fiction since 2024.
The 25 stories collection, “Tales From Another Time”, will be published on 14 February, 2026, and is being described by the publisher as “twenty-five short stories of spies, magic and mystery.” True to Chowdhury’s form, the stories are expected to bend genre and geography alike, drawing from his lived experiences in Chennai, Islamabad, London, and New York—four cities that loosely serve as the backdrop for his latest literary offering.
Chowdhury, whose previous novels include “The Other Side of Eden”, “Never Among Equals”, “The Secrets We Live In”, and “Finding Alexey”, is known for his thematic fearlessness and narrative verve. In “Tales From Another Time”, he introduces what he calls “interesting characters”—enigmatic figures shaped as a hybrid of Lenin and McCarthy, blending the ideological weight of one with the paranoia of the other.
It’s not just the premise but the book as a marvelous prose epic, a work that rivals the great novels of the twentieth century in its richness of comedy, dramatic force, and global etiquette.
What continues to distinguish Chowdhury’s fiction is its tonal duality. His prose is ruthlessly sentimental yet never mawkish, engaging the reader in a clockwork world that feels perpetually on the brink of collapse. There is a unique craft to Fazle Chowdhury’s writing—an alchemy of precision and provocation, where the horror is ignited in one paragraph, only to be met with a strangely soothing comedy in the next. It’s a tonal balancing act few writers attempt, and fewer still manage to sustain, but Chowdhury seems to have found an unique rhythm where the prose reminds us of the enduring power of narrative that entertains as it unsettles, reveals, consoles and listen more closely, not only to the story, but to the silence in between.