Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was set in the council estates and migrant enclaves of a London that few politicians acknowledge, and in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 killing of soldier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian converts to Islam. A literary La Haine, owing more to Wiley than to Peter Ackroyd, it presented the capital as noise: Lon‑din, a city contaminated by an imperial past, a place where “constant, punishing memories are left to spill into one another”.
The follow-up, Mister, Mister, also begins and ends in London, and has as its backdrop a series of Islamist terror attacks across mainland Europe. It is inspired by the myths and stories surrounding “Jihadi Jack” Letts and Shamima Begum, modern apostates accused of travelling to Syria to carry out the murderous bidding of Islamic State. Who were they? What had turned them into monsters? They became tabloid fodder, political phantasms, at once overanalysed and underknown.
