Latest Reads: The Khan Saima Mir.

Be twice as good as men and four times as good as white men.

Jia Khan has always lived like this.

Successful London lawyer Jia Khan is a long way from the grubby Northern streets she knew as a child, where her father, Akbar Khan, led the Pakistani community and ran the local organised crime syndicate. Often his Jirga rule – the old way – was violent and bloody, but it was always justice of a kind.

Now, with her father murdered, Jia must return to take his place. The police have always relied on the Khan to maintain the fragile order of the streets. But a bloody power struggle has broken out among warring communities and nobody is safe.

Justice needs to be restored, and Jia is about to discover that justice always comes at a cost.

I had this book recommended to me and I can see why. The Khan is an utterly powerful and complex novel, a gripping tale of the criminal underworld, set in a bleak northern city where our main protagonist Jia Khan returns to a life she had fully intended to leave behind.

It is totally gripping from the start, Jia is a complicated, intuitively drawn character whose true centre becomes slowly clearer as Saima Mir unravels her layer by layer. Oft melancholy and with an underlying social sense to it, The Khan is a novel of both violence and peace, of choices made and choices taken away, set against the backdrop of a culture and community about which I knew nothing going in.

The writing is superb, the complicated relationships hugely compelling. I’m not in any way qualified to try and explain the nuances, I know only that it made me feel a range of emotions whilst caught up in it which is what I look for in my reading.

Violently vivid and unrelentingly honest, The Khan is superb and I highly recommend it.

You can purchase The Khan (Point Blank) Here.

Happy Reading!

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