Haunted and haggard, an old friend appears, unrecognisable, on an investment banker’s doorstep one South Kensington morning. The mysteries contained in this moment – Where has the man been? What has happened to him? Why has he returned? – form the basis of Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, In the Light of What We Know. Related by an unnamed and seemingly unremarkable narrator, the novel seeks to shine light on the enigma of Zafar, a class-traversing, world-beating, self-described interloper. At several breaking points, Zafar draws his friend into tales that scale the humble beginnings of the son of a Bangladeshi waiter to the heights of Oxford, Wall Street and the UN frontline. Cut not a little from Gatsby’s cloth, but shot through with bolts of Scheherazade, the novel unfurls a narrative of someone who has seen too much in a life defined by its pursuit of truth.

Set against the twinned backdrops of the financial crisis and the war in Afghanistan, this contemporary bildungsroman executes a number of grand allusions. A polyphonic novel whose scope pays tribute to Melville, George Eliot and David Foster Wallace, its far-reaching narrative integrates the discourses of philosophy, mathematics, literature, religion, world history, politics, finance, cognitive science and love. Across the discordant cities of Oxford, London, New York, Kabul, Islamabad and Sylhet, a rootless irony accommodates Zafar in place of a true home. At times seething with class-rage, at other times shuddering in the wake of the unseen enemy of privilege, Rahman’s ambitious first novel tells the multifaceted story of a postcolonial man who becomes global. Both sophisticated and tender, In the Light of What We Know is an intricate account of the audacity of world-making and a eulogy to our steadfast desire to understand and be understood.

Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer.