Guy Gunaratne is sipping lemon and ginger tea at the end of a larynx-taxing week recording the audiobook of their latest novel, Mister, Mister. The book is set partly in east London, where we’re meeting before they catch an evening flight home to their wife and two young children in Malmö, Sweden. For the author of 2018’s Booker-longlisted In Our Mad and Furious City (or Mad, as they handily call it), the zigzag itinerary has become a routine: the new book, initally sparked by the controversy surrounding Shamima Begum, was completed during a three-year fellowship at Cambridge, which they took up in 2019 shortly after becoming a father. “The university gave me a room and a desk; no lecturing, just writing.” Then the pandemic hit. “It was tough. When I was younger I dreamed of a project that would transform you – where you’d be a different person at the end of it – and that’s certainly been true of this, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”
A difficult second novel, at least for the author, Mister, Mister is a rollercoaster coming-of-age picaresque, set against 40 years of bloodshed in the Middle East, from Desert Storm to Islamic State, and narrated by a fatherless young Londoner, Yahya, half-English, half-Iraqi, raised in a refuge by Muslim women before becoming a poet-preacher whose tub-thumping lyrics echo dangerously around the world in an age of keyboard warriors only too ready to step out from behind the screen. The book starts with Yahya held as a terror suspect, having recently returned from Syria – and he’s just sliced off his own tongue, spilling his life’s twists and turns solely in writing for the eponymous Mister, the shadowy British official quizzing him.
