Home Boy

Winner of the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature finally gets a UK release, courtesy of Penguin, and about time too.

Home Boy deals with the post 9/11 paranoia surrounding America with spikey gusto, setting its band of Muslim libertines, AC, Jimbo and Chuck - Metrostanis, the urban Pakistanis that inhabit New York's hipster spots, drink its bars dry and chase its girls all over the city. Their strong friendship is bonded by drink, drugs and a similar cultural heritage. The book opens with their lives of Riley, with the ever-encroaching blow of post-terrorism New York (this is set in the weeks and months after 9/11) creeping in on them. When they decide to go on a road trip to find The Shaman upstate, a mythical pot-dealer with a line in Gatsby-esque mystique, they quickly find that life outside of New York does not forget the skin colour of terrorism so easily, as their cushy lives come crashing down.

Saying much more than that would give away some of the book's power, how it visceral moves from quiet to loud to quiet to loud, in varying degrees of emotion.

The book, part coming of age and part New York cityscape, bursts with the heart of a rhythmical slam poet, which is apt given Naqvi's past in that medium. The sentences fizz with an urgency, an energy, a relevancy only found in the oral tradition of storytelling.

It is fast and quick but heavy and full of ideas. The language is evocative of Sufi mysticism and Hunter S Thompson-esque verve. This is a treat of a book, so treat yourself homeboy (or girl).