At a time when the state-of-the-nation novel has eluded so many of our most well-known novelists, Zia Haider Rahman debuts with one that captures the state of the whole planet. Within one amazing estranged friendship, he persuasively weaves together the events that shook the world between 2001 and 2009 with a Sebaldian flair (one of his quoted influences). Hands-down one of the best novels I have ever read. – James, Daunt Books Belsize Park
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack, until he recognizes a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with unshakeable legacies of class and culture, and pushes at the great questions of love, origins, science, faith and war. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has woven the seismic upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare compassion, scope, and courage.
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