Edgware Road by Yasmin Cordery Khan

 

Edgware Road by Yasmin Cordery Khan.

Published 3rd March 2022 by Head of Zeus. An Apollo book.

From the cover of the book:

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

1981. 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.

2003. 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.

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Our story begins in 1981 with Khalid Quraishi, a man who considers himself lucky in more ways than one. He has a beautiful wife and daughter, and a job he loves rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty in the glitzy Playboy casino in London's West End. It's a world away from his upbringing in Karachi, and he sees bright things ahead for him and his family. But Khalid is also a gambler, and his compulsion to play the odds in pursuit of that tantalising big win leads him into trouble. 

1987 finds him with a broken marriage and desperate to recapture his dreams. When he is offered the chance of a lifetime to get involved with a business deal involving the creation of a new bank, he is sure that this will be the big break he needs. But appearances can be deceptive and this time the gamble involves some very dodgy business partners.

In 2003, Khalid's daughter Alia has only hazy memories of her father, as she saw little of him after her parents' divorce, beyond infrequent meetings at Underground stations around London. When he was found dead in 1987, after failing to turn up to one of their father-daughter Tube meetings, the police put his death down to an accident - although the fact that his body was dragged from the Solent was rather odd for a man who lived in the Edgware Road. This loss has always left Alia feeling that she knows little about the Pakistani half of her heritage, and how this impacts her own sense of identity. The time has come for her to find out what sort of man Khalid was and why he ended his days in a watery grave...

This is a book full of delicious surprises! It starts with the slow-burn of a domestic drama of a family torn apart by one man's ambition and inability to control his gambling addiction, and then heads off into a glorious twisty and expansive mystery thriller that delves into corruption, ineptitude, and very dark deeds.

Although the novel begins way back in 1981, the story primarily consists of two timelines - 1987, with Khalid's tale, and a parallel thread from a new MP in the House of Commons, Mark Denby; and 2003 when Alia is compelled to find out more about her father. The timelines swap back and forth building layer upon layer, until we begin to see the truth about Khalid's foolish naivety, and how he gets himself mired in underhand deals on a global scale through a chance meeting with Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. 

Alia's detective work drives the story, ratcheting up the tension and pulling you in as she tracks down the clues, confronts the complicit, and reels from the impact of what she finds out. The significant emotional impact of what she discovers is really interesting, affecting not only her view of her father, but also the way she sees herself and what she is due. I also thoroughly enjoyed how Mark Denby is used as a story device to shed light on the truly shocking scale of the corruption Khalid unwittingly becomes involved in, and adds a very cleverly worked element of tangible menace and very believable conspiracy to the piece.

The scale of this novel is immense in the way it brings in themes of identity; the driving ambition of immigrants desperate to leave their old lives behind, and yet tied to their heritage; the complexities of family dynamics; and a whole raft of political and societal issues. I was especially struck by the way Cordery Khan does such an impressive job conjuring the perfect feeling of time and place for every single part of this truly stunning debut. It's not just that she takes us from London to Pakistan and back again and across the different timelines so well, but the way she brings the complicated and contradictory sides of the late 1980s alive in these pages so authentically, recreating the brashness, the clash of cultures, the tense political atmosphere under Thatcher, the endemic racism and sexism yet to be addressed, while at the same time blending real and fictional characters, and pervading this all with the unmistakable sense that change is coming. As someone old enough to remember all this first hand, I am in awe!

This is a book that easily makes it onto the pile of my books of the year. Definitely one you do not want to miss!

Edgware Road is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Head of Zeus for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Yasmin Cordery Khan is an historian and broadcaster. She is the author of The Great Partition (for which she won the Gladstone Prize for History), and The Raj at War, and has written for the Guardian and the Observer. Edgware Road is her first novel.