Edgware Road

A wide-ranging and affecting debut novel about family and identity, from an award-winning historian.

1. Khalid Quraishi is one of the lucky ones. He works nights in the glitzy West End, and comes home every morning to his beautiful wife and daughter. He’s a world away from Karachi and the family he left behind.

But Khalid likes to gamble, and he likes to win. Twenty pounds on the fruit machine, fifty on a sure-thing horse, a thousand on an investment that seems certain to pay out. Now he’s been offered a huge opportunity, a chance to get in early with a new bank, and it looks like he’ll finally have his big win.

1. Alia Quraishi doesn’t really remember her dad. After her parents’ divorce she hardly saw him, and her mum refuses to talk about her charming ex-husband. So, when he died in what the police wrote off as a sad accident, Alia had no reason to believe there was more going on.

Now almost twenty years have passed and she’s tired of only understanding half of who she is. Her dad’s death alone and miles from his west London stomping ground doesn’t add up with the man she knew. If she’s going to find out the truth about her father - and learn about the other half of herself - Alia is going to have to visit his home, a place she’s never been, and connect with a family that feel more like strangers.

‘Part family mystery, part immigrant hustle, Edgware Road is a complete tour de force… Khan calls up all the ghosts that prowl between children and their parents, between immigrants and their homelands, between our dreams of wealth and our hunger for love, and exorcises them with prose so lapidary and understanding so vast Khan’s novel is like unto a blessing’ Junot Diaz