There are some choices you must make in life which truly feel like being at a crossroads. For Amir, the student protagonist of Kasim Ali’s second novel Who Will Remain?, that moment arrives when his childhood friend Adnan rocks up, now a savvy and loaded drug dealer. “These streets are paved with gold,” Adnan says of inner-city Birmingham. “You just need to know where to look.”
Growing up with so little money he has had to walk the hard concrete streets (which have never appeared gold to him) rather than take the bus and relying on his friend Mohsin to pay for pretty much everything, Amir is taken in by Adnan’s situation. There’s his swish car, the fancy house his parents live in (they don’t ask questions), but perhaps most of all there’s his confidence, his certainty about the future, his power.
