No one asks after dead children. That’s the long and short of it. No one asks how they’re doing at university or whether they’ve got that job they were going for. No one asks after their partners, or their spouses. No one asks about their children. No one wonders if they call. Baroness Armstrong, a retired High Court judge and member of the House of Lords, is asked by the Home Secretary to interview a young woman who has just returned from Iraq with a view to using her as a poster child for a proposed bill limiting the return of jihadists who have joined the conflict in the Middle East. In an unmarked bunker on the edge of Heathrow the Baroness meets with the woman who is anything but unsympathetic. Bright and articulate, it is the Baroness who finds herself having to having to defend the position of the state, and her role in it, while trying to extract the young woman’s story and burying the memory of her son, killed in Afghanistan many years before. As the night draws on, the Baroness finds herself coerced into becoming a tool for unnamed security forces, eager for information they can use against outside forces. An immediate and timely novel, Thomas Alexander’s Children of The Jihad draws from the lives of two women, both of whom want to change the world, and looks at the conflict between the Establishment and Islamic Extremists, the world order they are trying to protect, and their reasons for doing so.