"Gunaratne is a writer with a rare ability to inhabit savants, outsiders, rebels and others who exist at the socalled margins of mainstream society, and who they write slapbang into the centre. Moving between women's houses and detention centres, global and UK politics, tenderness and devastation, Mister, Mister is where it's at." Isabel Waidner
"Most contemporary British novels limit themselves to moving the furniture round a bit, or even just describing the furniture. Mister, Mister tears down the whole house and, from the wreckage, builds a hall of mirrors. Furious, incredibly bold, beautiful, ugly, heart-breaking and most of all alive, this is a book which lays waste to your assumptions - whatever they are." Will Ashon
"I wish I could declare a national reading day in Britain where adults read the same book together, beginning with Mister Mister. Gunaratne fits a whole nation inside one complex character and in doing so shows us our bones and our souls. Brimming with compassion and Dickensian in its breadth, this incredibly important book eviscerates othering and insists that Britain claim a new identity." Leone Ross
"Gunaratne offers us the study of a young man navigating many identities while searching for security and selfhood. Mister, Mister is a modern testimony of the "British / other" subject as well as an invitation for us, readers, lovers of stories to be defined on our own terms. This is a vital novel of newness and nowness that testifies to the power of fiction that seeks truth." Raymond Antrobus
"This book tears through you. A searing, shocking odyssey through faith, fury, and the boiling despair at the heart of our age.” Musa Okongwa
Idiot, poet, jihadist, son. Who is Yahya Bas? An exuberantly imaginative novel of Britishness and unbelonging from the prizewinning author of In Our Mad and Furious City.
When Yahya Bas finds himself in a UK detention centre after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face.
What was he doing in the desert? Why does he hate this country? Why did he write the incendiary verses which turned him into an online sensation and a media pariah?
Mister, his interrogator, wants to keep him locked up. So he decides to tell his life story. On his own terms.
Following a child that East Ham made who becomes the unwitting voice of a generation, Mister, Mister is also the story of a quest for a father and the discovery of another way to live in the shadow of war. Bracing, tender, exuberantly imaginative, this is a novel that only Guy Gunaratne could have written.
