Alex Tickell is Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK, and Director of the OU’s Postcolonial Literatures Research Group. He specializes in South-Asian literatures in English and has published widely on nineteenth-century colonial fiction, early writing in English by Indian authors, and contemporary fiction from the subcontinent. His publications include Selections from ‘Bengaliana’, Alternative Indias edited with Peter Morey and a readers’ guide to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (Routledge, 2007).