Brinda Charry’s new novel ‘Hocus Pocus’ reimagines a magical Boston

Curator's Note

The novelist Brinda Charry has written a book about one of us. Hocus Pocus follows Samuel, an Indian stage magician who comes to Boston in 1816, the “year without a summer.” A museum owner shows him off as an exotic curiosity, and audiences keep trying to box him in no matter what he does on stage.

What makes WBUR’s piece worth your time is how Charry came to the subject. She admits she knew almost nothing about magic at first, but she ended up glad Samuel was a magician because the art let her write about someone who transcends ethnic and national lines. Northeastern professor and lifelong magician Stephen Wood adds some period color on 19th-century parlor magic. He also argues that magic, long an old boys’ club, is finally opening up, and that its visual nature lets it cross cultures like few other arts can.

Kate Brodkin October 2, 2026 12:00 am Boston, MA Comment

Boston was the first place Brinda Charry arrived when she migrated to the United States from India in 1999. Twenty-seven years later, she has sent a character there too: an Indian stage magician arriving in the city from Europe.

That magician is Samuel, the protagonist of Charry’s new novel, “Hocus Pocus.” He arrives in Boston as a curiosity, and Walter Mepham, a collector who runs the New Boston Museum, treats him like one. “He’s just another piece of exotica he adds to the museum,” Charry said.

Walter said as much in the novel: “Samuel is mine, mine more than any other thing at the museum.” But Charry complicates his perception of Samuel as the novel unfolds.

Samuel gradually becomes something more like an obsession for Walter. Walter begins to see Samuel not only as an exotic object, but as a young man he is genuinely attracted to, and one he may even love.

The tension Charry creates between Samuel and Walter’s perception of him and his identity is central to Samuel’s experience as a magician in Boston. It’s also a part of what drew Charry to setting the novel in Boston.

Charry originally came to the United States as a graduate student attending Syracuse University. She later moved to Keene, New Hampshire, where she has taught in the English department at Keene State College since 2005. “Hocus Pocus” is Charry’s fourth novel (and second published in the United States), following 2023’s “The East Indian,” which follows the journey of a young Indian boy after being kidnapped and taken to Jamestown, Virginia.

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