A Boy Like You

A powerful contemporary British literary novel about race, suspicion, family, silence and the architecture of disbelief.

Tahir is nineteen years old. He lives in York with his Bangladeshi Muslim family. His father is a consultant cardiologist. His mother works in a city pharmacy. His sister is still at school. In the mornings, the smell of mustard oil and panch phoron fills the kitchen. The Hajj photograph hangs in the corridor. The adhan from Bull Lane sometimes reaches Heworth Green on the south wind.

Tahir is a student, a son, and a brother: a young man trying to move through the city without becoming a question.

But long before the trial, long before the headlines, long before his life is reduced to evidence, something has already begun.

A woman at the bus stop refuses his greeting. A seminar room hears his words differently from another student's. A traffic camera records a journey before he knows it will matter. A mosque, a university, a road, a party, a knife, a photograph and a silence begin to gather around him.

When accusation enters his life, Tahir is forced into a public story already prepared for a boy like him: suspicious, foreign, dangerous, explainable before he speaks.

Around him, his family are pulled into the machinery of police, prison, court, media, community politics and private grief. Each carries another record of what the world has made of them: the father addressed too casually on the ward round, the mother asked whether she speaks English, the sister learning what silence costs in a classroom.

Written with restraint, precision and moral force, A Boy Like You is a contemporary literary novel about race, Islamophobia, surveillance, family loyalty, institutional suspicion and the long afterlife of being falsely known.

It asks what happens when a life is processed before it is understood, and what remains when a young man refuses the story the world has written for him.