A suicide bombing is being planned in Manchester and Saleem Khan an atheist seventy years of
age is carrying the bomb. Also concealed on his person is a cache of vivid haunting memories
– some of regret and yearning some humorous others over-shadowed by the brutality of war.
Award-winning novelist Tariq Mehmood plunges the reader into the dizzying saga of Saleem’s
incendiary history. In the 1960s he left his lover his job as a teacher and his home in
rural Pakistan and emigrated to Bradford a town crackling with racism. He found a job in a
mill on an all-Asian night shift. He became an active trade unionist and later when the mills
closed down drove a taxi. But inevitably he is impelled to return to Pakistan. From Pakistan
Saleem is drawn across the border into the killing fields of Afghanistan. Among Russian
soldiers and the holy warriors of the Mujahadeen he meets Gulzarina the woman whose life and
experiences promise to make sense of Saleem’s own tortuous history.
