Peter O'Neil 

Peter O'Neil arrived in Bangem an engineer who had never stood at the front of a classroom, sent to teach

in a room with no glass in the windows. He expected to be useful for two years and go home.

Instead, three boys turned up at his door with a broom. A widow named Mami Elizabeth set a place for himat her fire, called him her child, and fed him five nights a week. A village decided the young American

teacher had been alone long enough, and quietly took him in.

On the day he left, O'Neil wrote home that there was no one in Bangem he would be dying to see again.

This is the story of how wrong he was.

Seabrook Press, 2026. Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

https://www.amazon.com/Place-Set-Me-Cameroon-Unexpected/dp/B0H6NK3FFD/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

A warm, funny, deeply human memoir about the friendships that turn a foreign country into a home.

Peter O'Neil had lived and taught on four continents, and when people asked whether he would ever go to India, his answer was always the same: next lifetime. Then a job came open at an international school in New Delhi, and he went.

Chai & Chapati is the story of the two years that followed, and of the people who carried him through them. There are the five Kasana cousins, Punjabi men who fold a solitary American into their family without a second thought. There is the driver who reads the city for him, and another who dreams of a wedding he is still saving for. There is Krishan, reserved, brilliant, unforgettable, the deepest friendship of O'Neil's years abroad and the one he never learned to name. And there are the students, more than a classroom's worth of reasons to have come at all.

Across two years, O'Neil is taken to a village wedding in the Punjab, to temples high and humble, to the fire-lit banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, and into kitchens where he learns to make the two things he will carry home in his hands: masala chai and chapati. He writes about caste and inequality, about faith held lightly and held close, and about loving and being befriended as a gay man far from home, with the immersive warmth and clear eye of Peter Hessler's River Town and Kris Holloway's Monique and the Mango Rains. It is a travel-and-friendship memoir that happens to be told by a gay man: no coming-out arc, no agenda, only a life fully received in a place not his own.

Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

https://www.amazon.com/Chai-Chapati-Years-Friendships-Carried/dp/B0H8H8SJ9X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pnMRdkS_q5EPgor-zcIZvCb8k0ZxIryHUxKw2S-kbC_qn01c4NcHMVrMQPeB7s9ieOX4qdwwHBcN_mqWyQ0BtPJuu2IH0Nkd2E36jPvMBfYt5rkyITPmnZjIZ_bRIhKe9FrH7jwmPr2Qdhj06zyTUll9926OdMCxBhrdywnXw7WReBbumUKqkzC5W1N1qboPT_x_V1CwIxMsAWu6eTD_7eGD6wshtYLCDga0r7bahVE.rKUOzxnOpMNocPKfxp1MGcqoMVBv0bfUjjcSarXxuxU&qid=1783887528&sr=1-1

Peter O'Neil grew up on Chicago's North Shore, earned a degree in engineering, and then joined the Peace Corps instead. From 1988 to 1990, he taught mathematics in a mountain village in Cameroon. The experience changed what he wanted from a life.

For the next thirty-five years, he kept choosing classrooms, teaching in Chicago, Venezuela, Cairo, Florida, Paris, New Delhi, and Moscow. At a neighborhood school in Chicago, he spent seven years teaching teenagers, two of them in Spanish to newly arrived immigrant students. Along the way, he became a National Board Certified Teacher.

He writes the memoirs that life left him. A Place Set for Me tells of the Cameroon village that set a stool at its fire and made him one of its own. Chai & Chapati: Two Years in India, and the Friendships That Carried Me follows a guarded man to New Delhi, where five young cousins and one unexpected friend refuse to let him keep his distance.

Both books are warm, funny, and clear-eyed about the harder truths of the places he loved, and about the unexpected friendships that reached across every distance of culture, class, faith, and, in the India years, his experience as a gay man far from home.

He has taught in two languages, been welcomed in more he never learned, and sat at tables the world over as a guest. He has never gotten over any of it.

O'Neil publishes under his own Seabrook Press imprint and lives in Evanston, Illinois.