The perilous porousness between our online and offline worlds is the spark for Nicolas Padamsee’s tinderbox thriller about two teenage boys. Deeply astute and devastating in its commentary on immigrant communities, England Is Mine joins a new generation of politically charged novels – including Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Priya Guns’s Your Driver Is Waiting – in exposing the power and pitfalls of online platforms.
Two youths, David and Hassan, whose intertwined tales are told by turns, are students at the same school in east London. David is a strict vegan and has few friends. He doesn’t plan on going to university (“There would be no reading novels anyway, he thinks. There would only be criticising novels for their heteronormativity, their whiteness, their Europeanness, their whateverness”). As an Anglo-Iranian, he perpetually feels the burden of the question “Where are you from?” His parents are divorced. Between caring for his vulnerable father on the one hand, and bickering with his overbearing but well-meaning mother on the other, he is forced to flit between two houses but rarely feels at home.
