Mister, Mister - by Guy Gunaratne (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A blazingly propulsive novel from the prize-winning author of In Our Mad and Furious City, following a captured jihadist and poet-preacher as he recounts his path to international notoriety

Who is Yahya Bas? Revolutionary poet, notorious jihadist, misbegotten son, self-styled idiot-boy. When the enigmatic Yahya finds himself languishing in a detention center after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face.

What was he doing in the desert? Why did he betray his home country? What led him to write the incendiary verses that launched him into international infamy? Mister, his interrogator, wants answers. So Yahya resolves to tell his own story, in his own words, and on his own terms.

Mister, Mister is what follows: a coming-of-age story of radical self-invention, a quest for a long-lost father, and a discovery of another way to live in the shadow of war. Brash, biting, yet ultimately tender and bracingly imaginative, Mister, Mister follows a child of the tumultuous 90s and the ravaged aughts as he becomes the unwitting voice of a generation.

Who is Yahya Bas? An anti-hero for our modern era, in which we've just begun to survey the wreckage of the West's forever-wars.

Review Quotes

"Gunaratne has a gift for inhabiting the lives of their characters."
--The New York Times

"Guy Gunaratne throws words against the wall and makes us watch them bounce. You feel the heat, reel from the sound, and bump to the unstoppable pulse."
―Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize

"Thrillingly ambitious."
--Guardian

"Gunaratne creates in their narrator, Yahya, a perceptive, sensitive character with an energetic and affecting voice....A penetrating view of the legacies of extremism."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Brilliantly evocative of the effects of recent horrors many people are all-too keen to forget, Gunaratne's latest affirms that they are a writer with a unique voice and a magnificent ear for dialogue."
--Booklist

About the Author

GUY GUNARATNE is the author of Mister, Mister and In Our Mad and Furious City, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Jhalak Prize, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Guy was a Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is a trustee at English PEN. They have also served on various literary prize judging panels including the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019 and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2023.