In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

The debut novel from Guy Gunaratne’s sensational debut novel In Our Mad and Furious City is story based on 48 hours and a community and three friends who live on or close to the Stones council estate in North London. This is a story of three young men and the series of events that led up to riots taking place and rising tensions.

An off duty British soldier is brutally killed by a black Muslim man and tensions bubble to the surface and riots start to breakout. Was the killer an extremist? For the three friends Ardan, Selvon and Yusuf are all different yet they are on the fringes of the claustrophobic estate. This is an incredibly powerful novel that at times is so tense that you feel that one spark while reading this novel could explode into chaos and anarchy.

Gunaratne tells his story of a divided community and country. It is written with incredible passion and shattered dreams of those living on the estate. London is a city of those who dare to dream of great things but it is a city that can leave you in despair and can crush those dreams. There is also a cast of those who live on the Stones Estate who lend their voice to this complex storyline. There is Caroline who was sent from Belfast to London by her family during the troubles, she has demons of her own to contend with. We also hear from Nelson who moved to the UK from the Caribbean and now in his later years still recalls the bad times of the Fascist Oswald Mosely. There is long history of troubles echoing from the past.

In Our Mad and Furious City crackles with tension all the way through, the prose is excellent and mixed with numerous accents and dialects. The real story of this debut novel is not just about this council estate in London, it is a story of what is wrong with the country and the world we are living in. This is not just ‘another debut novel’ it is an incredibly important book. Not an easy book to write because of the subject but Guy Gunaratne is a writer to look out for in the future.

304 Pages.

Thank you to Georgina Moore at Headline for the review copy of In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne.

In Our Mad and Furious City is published by Tinder Press and was published on 19^th April 2018 and is available through Waterstones, Amazon and through your local independent bookshop.