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'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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