Mister, Mister

About the book

'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


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.