Spirituality meets science, fantasy meets reality, and East meets West in this wonderfully layered novel that repudiates each one of the above-mentioned binaries. Could he be…is he…a jinn? And that parting gift from Alif’s ex-girlfriend, an old manuscript hand lettered in gold ink–might the book be the Alf Yeom, the jinn’s secret book of knowledge? Together, they search for a mysterious underworld figure known as Vikram the Vampire, who might be their only hope to escape the Hand.īut Vikram doesn’t appear quite human. And he’s a keen proponent of the theory of masculine superiority, noting with surprise at one point that his female companion is “as smart as man.” You don’t want him to be caught be the Hand, but there’s no doubt he deserves a good smackdown.įortunately for Alif, his travelling companion Dina (who’s been roped unwilling into his travails) is calm and sensible enough for them to have a fighting chance. That is the only way this day could have gone so terribly wrong,” he moans. “I committed a sin by waking up this morning. Alif might feature on the World’s Best Coders list, but when facing a corporeal enemy, his shortcomings are revealed to be as varied as they are plentiful-he lacks resourcefulness and can’t think on his feet, he antagonizes those who could help, and he’s supremely whiny.

But Alif, whose clients include Islamists, feminists, anarchists, secularists and pornographers (anyone whose online activities might run afoul of the state), is finally undone when his upper-class girlfriend dumps him for the state’s head of security, a shadowy figure known as the “Hand of God”.

In an unnamed state at the time of the Arab Spring, Alif, an Arab-Indian hacktivist, manages to stay a step ahead of the state’s increasingly efficacious attempts to capture him. In Alif the Unseen, she gives us a novel whose thriller elements are in perfect equipoise with a deep understanding of the current socio-political ferment in the Middle East. Willow Wilson is a boundary and border crosser of the rarest variety–a sophisticated political thinker who is also a cracking storyteller.

Alif the unseen review