On his maiden trip to India with his new book, The Man on the Endless Stair, Chris Barkley surprised us with his greeting. “Aapse milkar acchha laga,” he started in his British accent and a wide smile, as we sat to chat before his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival. A quick learner, we complimented, and he responded, “Seekh raha hoon”, with a casual laugh, putting us at ease. There is a deep sense of curiosity in the way he speaks; something more like a child embarking on a new journey, fascinated with his discoveries. His debut novel, The Lost Author, and his new novel, a dark mystery set on a Scottish island, resonate with his spirit. It follows a budding author who embarks on a quest to find the murderer of his mentor, while there’s also an internal inquiry that he embarks on.

The novelist and short story writer has amassed readers across continents with his thrillers and won multiple awards, including the Oxford University Kellogg Writing Competition in 2021, the Bedford International Writing Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025. The Edinburgh-based author also writes poetry and won The Stage Award at Edinburgh Fringe in 2018.

Our tete-a-tete picked up with his interest in the idea of trauma and cycles of trauma. He draws this from his experience of working in an alternative school with trauma-experienced young people. “When I was working in an alternative school with trauma-experienced young people, I was asking myself the question: How does one escape a cycle of trauma? And I think a murder mystery is actually a great form to choose to interrogate that question. In my new novel, the main character is a young author who’s experienced lots of trauma himself. He’s a war veteran. And as a result of his trauma, he has all of this ambition, this drive…. He wants to force his way to achieve something grand, and then his mentor is murdered. So, he’s trying to track down the murderer while also going on an inward journey himself, recognising the trauma that he’s experienced and thinking, ‘Why do I want to become this amazing writer?’,” It is these existential questions, coupled with a murder mystery, that make his book hard to put down.

With his characters and plot, Barkley, the winner of the National Flash Fiction Day 2021, embarks on a dual journey. It all stems partly from his love for mystery stories. But how does he balance external mystery and internal journey? “I’m interested in physics, and there is an interpretation of quantum theory called cubism, which says that physics is an interplay between storytelling and equation writing. Emotion is, you know, the internal, and equation writing is the external. Our ability to experience is hindered by the trauma which we’ve gone through. So this is the spiritual journey and understanding what we’ve gone through and how that’s hindering our ability to participate and join in the story, which is collaborative, which I think is a beautiful idea. This idea has been in Eastern spirituality for a very long time, but I think we’ve kind of lost sight of that, perhaps in the West, a little bit. What’s amazing is that physics is now saying what spirituality has been saying for a very long time,” explained Barkley, who held the audience’s attention in three sessions at JLF.

Barkley’s books engage strongly with conventions of the genre that have been popular among bookworms across the globe. Being a new-age author, aware that the readers would look for something unique in the story, which tropes did he embrace and which ones did he consciously subvert? “I suppose there’s the trope of the influential mentor, the eccentric, quite problematic character who’s Malcolm, this great mystery novelist who is murdered. And I don’t want to spoil too much, but I do subvert that trope towards the end of the novel and give some more heart to his character instead of just putting him as an archetype of this grizzled old guy. You start to see the causes and conditions which have led him to be that way. I love the quest narrative, the hero’s journey,” said Barkley, for whom Agatha Christie has been a big inspiration and whose grave he recently visited in Oxford. The hook of his new novel is the metaphysical mystery involving a manuscript left behind by the victim for his protégé to follow and find his murderer.

Most of the authors find reflection in their lead protagonist, which is quite natural, but Barkley’s imprints are uniform in his books. He tells us, “I think I’m all of my characters, and I’m all of the landscape as well. It’s set on an island, and I stayed briefly on this island on the coast of Scotland. For me, the island is a reflection of the main character’s psyche. There’s also a mansion, and the mansion is sort of a monument to his ego, and then the island starts to kind of invade that. So I think the island itself is also a reflection of me and who I am.” Barkley, who is into hiking, adds, “I think anyone who has spent time in the wilderness for a while will understand that it starts to speak to you in a way, start to listen and read things. It’s grand, but also terrifying; it’s quite sublime in that way. And I think that’s what I’ve aspired to write, something sublime, grand and terrifying.”

Barkley wrote this novel while he was working in a warehouse packing books, and with some planning and a good deal of discipline, managed to complete the first draft in eight months. The thriller writer has set the target of 2027 for his next book, which, interestingly, will be a love story set in a scientific cult that believes that they can measure love. With Artificial Intelligence clearly making inroads in our lives and not just measuring data but even emotional quotient with their algorithms, it will be interesting to see how Barkley channels this new tool into his new book.