Tinder Press reveals ‘tender and explosive’ novel by award-winning author Gunaratne

Tinder Press is to publish Mister, Mister, a new novel by Guy Gunaratne, author of the Dylan Thomas Prize-winning In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder Press).

The book is the second in a two-book deal brokered in 2017 by publisher Mary-Anne Harrington for UK and Commonwealth rights from Sophie Lambert at C&W. Four publishers were involved in the auction. 

Publisher Mary-Anne Harrington said: “Mister, Mister is a novel only Guy Gunaratne could have written; a boldly imagined, tender and explosive story of a fraught coming-of-age, Britishness and unbelonging, which will cement Guy’s reputation as one of the most exciting novelists at work today.” Publication is scheduled for 25th May 2023.

The synopsis reads: “When Yahya Bas finds himself in a UK detention centre after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face. What was he doing in the desert? Why does he hate his own country? Why did he write the incendiary verses that turned him into an online sensation and media pariah?

“His interrogator, known only in the novel as Mister, wants answers, so Bas decides to tell his life story, from his curious upbringing with a collection of foster mothers in London’s East Ham, to his radicalised youth, fame and celebrity, and ultimately exile.”

Harrington continued: “It’s a novel about a young man who unwittingly becomes the voice of a generation, about a son’s quest for a father and his discovery of a gentler way of living in the shadow of war. It’s thrilling to see Guy’s writing take such an ambitious turn, and fans of In Our Mad and Furious City are in for a huge treat.”

Literary agent Sophie Lambert of C&W described Yahya Bas as an “unforgettable protagonist” whose story should be our story, and the story of our generation. “I can’t wait for Guy’s blistering second novel to find its way into many hands,” she said.

Alongside winning the Dylan Thomas Prize, In Our Mad and Furious City was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths and Gordon Burn prizes, longlisted for the Booker Prize and Orwell prize, and won the Jhalak Prize and The Authors’ Club’s 2019 Best First Novel Award.

Gunaratne, who is a trustee on the board of English PEN as well as being a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, said: “This is a story of a single life, but also the last 25 years – from Britain in the 1990s, 9/11, to the Iraq War, 7/7 and its aftermath. Yahya Bas is a chimera of sorts – rootless, villainous, othered by almost everyone he meets, yet undeniably familiar and entirely British.”