Books

A novel set in early Victorian London, teeming with unforgettable characters and full of narrative tension. This is a novel of tragedy and irony as well as humour and hope. Known for his refusal to fit his work into established diasporic, subalternist or post-colonialist narrative traditions, in The Thing About Thugs, Khair finally engages with these traditions by subtly and ironically deploying echoes from Victorian literature, ranging from Charles Dickens to P.M. Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position tells the interlinked stories of three unforgettable men – the flamboyant Ravi, the fundamentalist Karim and the unnamed and pragmatic Pakistani narrator – whose trajectories cross in Denmark. When a ‘terrorist attack’ takes place in town, all three men find themselves embroiled in doubt, suspicion and, perhaps, danger. An acerbic commentary on the times, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position is also a bittersweet, spell-binding novel about love and life today.

Heart-wrenching, masterful and stunningly powerful, Jihadi Jane paints a vivid picture of militant brides operating around the world and the terrifying cost of religious fanaticism.

By turns poetic, chilling and heartbreaking, Night of Happiness is an unforgettable novel about the painful ironies of a world without tolerance.