Joey Harb possesses no fighting spirit, despite his surname meaning “war” in Arabic. He’s aimless and apathetic: meandering through his young life in western Sydney as a produce assistant at Woolworths, while being indulged by his grandmother Elaine, dabbling in drugs with his good friend Kyri, and getting on his mother Amal’s nerves. Everyone, he thinks, “feels the need to judge his existence”, but that doesn’t propel him to do anything about it.
Nothing changes when he finds himself among a group of young men arrested for a violent sexual crime. The fact that he sees the possible two-year prison sentence as “doable” suddenly adds a layer of meaning to the novel’s opening sentence, which tells us that he likes his banh mi with extra chilli, “because it numbed his mouth and he liked numbness”.
