Before beginning his writing career, Mukherjee was an accountant for 20 years. In 2013, at age 39, Mukherjee learned that Lee Child did not begin writing until age 40 and was inspired to begin writing himself. He began writing A Rising Man in September of that year, partly inspired by the Telegraph's Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, which he won the following year. The novel was ultimately published in 2016. Mukherjee's Wyndham series is based in Raj-era India. He has stated that this era of colonization in India intrigues him because he did not learn about it in British schooling, and the stories his parents shared about India differed significantly from what he learned in the classroom.