First, a confession: having opened Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s new novel Bugger, I put it down again for a month. I knew – at least in outline – what was coming, and I knew it would be hard to read.
This is Ahmad’s fourth novel, following works including The Tribe and its sequel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Lebs. As with Ahmad’s earlier writing, Bugger is layered and politically attuned, attentive to the intersections of race, class, gender and power. But where The Lebs expands outward into the violent social world of Punchbowl high school, Bugger does the opposite, spiralling inward over the course of one day, towards a single devastating moment.
