There are moments in publishing that feel less like a debut and more like an arrival. The kind of book that makes you wonder why it took this long, and then you meet the man behind it and the answer becomes obvious. Gurd Chahal has been living this story for the better part of sixty years. He just needed the world to catch up.

Cha’nir and the Light of Nam, Book One of the Sufy Epic series, has hit number one on Amazon, becoming one of the few South Asian fantasy titles by a British author to reach that position. It has done so not through a major publishing house or a big marketing budget, but through word of mouth, a deeply personal story, and a mythology that feels both ancient and urgent.

For those who have not yet heard of it, the book is set during the chaos of 1970s India, where a young girl named Cha’nir survives a massacre, is rescued by a cosmic guardian and raised on Lotus High, a mystical realm that exists between Earth and the heavenly world of Muktiland. Trained by sages to become both healer and warrior, she returns to Earth to face the Klesh Nine, demonic forces driven by greed, violence and fear, with the fate of humanity resting on whether she can hold the line.

It sounds epic because it is. But what sets it apart from the endless parade of fantasy novels jostling for shelf space is not the scale. It is the soul.

A Heroine Built from Real Lives

Cha’nir is not your typical fantasy protagonist. She is an orphan who carries the weight of her loss without ever being defined by it. She heals with one hand and raises her sword with the other. She is trained in the wisdom of sages and scarred by the violence of men. She is, as Gurd describes her, a mirror of the women he grew up watching.

“When I created Cha’nir, I wanted to honour the women who raised us. Quietly powerful, endlessly sacrificial. Women who carried the weight of two worlds, and yet never surrendered.” – Gurd Chahal

There is something specific and deliberate about that phrase, the weight of two worlds. It runs through the book like a current. Cha’nir is caught between the celestial and the earthly, between tradition and necessity, between who she was raised to be and what the world is demanding of her. Anyone who has grown up in a diaspora community will recognise that tension immediately.

Comparisons have already been drawn to Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy and Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, as well as to Game of Thrones in terms of scale and moral complexity. They are fair comparisons in terms of ambition, but Cha’nir is not derivative of any of them. The mythology here is rooted in South Asian oral tradition, in the kind of stories that were passed down not through books but through voices, around fires, under open skies.

At the heart of that tradition is the concept of Nam. In ancient Indian spirituality, Nam is the oldest light there is. It is the divine vibration of the Supreme Being, the invisible creative force that sustains every living thing. Saints and sages have meditated on it for centuries in search of the one truth beneath all others: that everything in existence is one. Gurd has woven this philosophy into the bones of the story, and the result is a fantasy that feels genuinely different to anything currently on the shelves.

A Life That Was Always Heading Here

Gurd Chahal was born in a terraced mud-house village in India without electricity or running water. His earliest memories are of elders and travelling sages who told stories under the stars. He arrived in Birmingham at eight years old with nothing but those stories and a fierce, unspoken determination to make something of himself.

The Birmingham he arrived in was not welcoming. It was the 1960s and racism was open, casual and constant. He watched his community struggle and he watched the women in it hold everything together with quiet, extraordinary strength. He filed all of it away, though he did not know why yet.

He went on to study at the University of Aston, graduating with a BSc in Pharmacy in 1980 and later a Postgraduate Diploma in 2007. He trained at Boots but quickly found corporate life too limiting for the way his mind worked. He moved into the independent sector and never looked back.

What followed was a career that most people would consider a full and remarkable life on its own. Together with his wife, also a pharmacist, he helped pioneer the opening of supermarket in-store pharmacies in the 1990s, including Kwik-Save’s first in-store pharmacy in Stafford. In 1995 they designed and opened the UK’s first award-winning drive-through pharmacy in Norton Canes, Cannock, a concept so ahead of its time that it later led to consultancy work with Finland’s largest pharmacy chain and presentations to Germany’s Pharmaceutical Society.

But pharmacy was only one thread. Running alongside it, and sometimes louder than it, was music. Gurd created Chahalco, which became one of the largest live music networks in the UK. Through it he discovered and nurtured artists who went on to define the culturally diverse British music scene that exists today. He also produced four Sufy concept albums in the early 1990s featuring some of the most celebrated singers from India and the UK, among them Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Pankaj Udhas, Gurdas Maan, Hans Raj Hans and Malkit Singh. Those albums are now being reimagined and remixed by his son Virron Chahal, with releases planned for 2026 and 2027.

And through all of it he served as a school governor at King Edward VI Aston School, championing cultural literacy and youth empowerment in the same community that once made him feel like an outsider.

“In my childhood there was no electricity, no television, only voices, stories and faith. Those stories carried light through the darkness. Writing Cha’nir is my way of keeping that light alive for a new generation.” – Gurd Chahal

The book, then, is not a hobby project or a late-life whim. It is the natural destination of a man who has spent sixty years collecting experiences, perspectives and stories, and who finally decided that the world needed to hear them.

Why This Book Matters Right Now

Diasporic storytelling has never been more central to Britain’s cultural conversation. From film to television to literature, South Asian voices are redefining what British identity looks and sounds like. Cha’nir and the Light of Nam arrives at exactly the right moment, not because it chases that conversation but because it was always going to be part of it.

The fantasy genre, for all its imagination, has historically been built around European mythology. Norse gods, Celtic warriors, Arthurian knights. The shelves are full of them. What Gurd has done is take the equally rich, equally ancient, and considerably less explored mythology of the Indian subcontinent and build a world from it that feels as vast and as real as anything those traditions have produced.

Cha’nir’s story resonates beyond the genre too. From the global conversation about women’s leadership to the quieter, daily negotiations of tradition and modernity that thousands of diaspora women navigate every week, this is a heroine for this particular moment. She does not choose between healing and fighting, between her roots and the world she lives in. She carries both, because she has no choice, and because that is what real strength looks like.

This is Book One of three. Book Two is already underway, and the Sufy Epic universe is set to expand into film, music and visual art. Given the speed with which Cha’nir has found its audience, nobody who reads it will be surprised by that.

Get Your Copy Now!

Cha’nir and the Light of Nam is available now. 

The eBook is priced at £1.79 until 31st May 2026, rising to £3.99 thereafter. 

The Paperback releases on Monday 25th May 2026 at £11.99 and the Hardback follows on Tuesday 2nd June 2026 at £18.99. 

All formats are available on Amazon: https://mybook.to/Sufy-Epic-Book-1

Website: https://www.sufyepic.com

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_M2YWfHNbE

For further info contact press@sufyepic.com