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Showing 1 - 6 of 6 matches in All Departments
'Enthralling' Guardian Culture Preview 'Imaginative and provocative' ID Books of 2023 'A vital novel of newness and nowness' Raymond Antrobus 'Devastating. The book we will all be reading in 2023' Nikesh Shukla 'A knockout' Big Issue A New Statesman Best Spring Fiction pick Idiot, poet, jihadist, son. Who is Yahya Bas? An exuberantly imaginative novel of Britishness and unbelonging from the prizewinning author of In Our Mad and Furious City. When Yahya Bas finds himself in a UK detention centre after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face. What was he doing in the desert? Why does he hate this country? Why did he write the incendiary verses which turned him into an online sensation and a media pariah? Mister, his interrogator, wants to keep him locked up. So he decides to tell his life story. On his own terms. Following a child that East Ham made who becomes the unwitting voice of a generation, Mister, Mister is also the story of a quest for a father and the discovery of another way to live in the shadow of war. Bracing, tender, exuberantly imaginative, this is a novel that only Guy Gunaratne could have written.
Raised by 'Many Mothers' and an eccentric uncle in a crumbling East Ham home, even Yahya Bas's birth is shrouded in myths which his absent father and distant birth mother are not on hand to dispel. His is an unconventional start in life, where his view of the world is shaped perhaps more by the TV (his many mothers' endless soaps and his uncle's endless new bulletins) as by a primary school where it is all he can do to escape daily beatings. When, as a teenager, he is sent to Islamic school, Yahya discovers an unexpected gift as a poet, and under his online alter ego as Al-Bayn, he becomes the most widely read poet in the country. But the consequences of his fame are ugly, and his need to learn what became of his father has become so pressing that he flees the UK to travel to Syria under an assumed name. What he counters there is very far from what he expected to find, and his confession, when he finds himself interned back in the UK, is one that will shake his interrogator to the core: it's the story of how Britain made Yahya in its own image, and above all, it's the story of a young man who insists on telling his story in his own defiant, incendiary words.
*WINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZE, THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE AND THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD* *LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE AND THE GORDON BURN* 'I was gripped... remarkable' Robert Macfarlane, Guardian Books of the Year 'A novel that doesn't flinch, and demands change right now' Ali Smith 'A novel so of this moment that you don't even realize you've waited your whole life for it' Marlon James For Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music and freedom. But now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe. While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan remain focused on their own obsessions, girls and grime. Their friend Yusuf is caught up in a different tide, a wave of radicalism surging through his local mosque, threatening to carry his troubled brother, Irfan, with it.
Chinese Dissonance juxtaposes ten stories about a homeless internet celebrity, a suicidal bride, an immigrant flower salesman, a world famous artist, a horrifying viral video and a former Communist soldier, all the while giving a glimpse into Chinese internet culture and its bizarre fascinations. Guy Gunaratne adapts real world commentary from Chinese internet social network streams and message boards and weaves them into ten unforgettable short stories.
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