FIRE IN THE UNNAMEABLE COUNTRY

Recall the magic of Arabian Nights, the horror of A Clockwork Orange, the exotic puzzle of The Savage Detectives and prepare to meet the future.

The universe is shaking as Hedayat, the “glossolali st” narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country, is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country's history and expose the root of its crisis. Hedayat's dark world is entirely foreign but oddly familiar, echoing the banality of our daily diversions and adding a terrifying twist. The Mirror, a gruesome, never-ending reality show, turns the city of La Maga into a permanent Hollywood-style film set where people gamble body parts and live in fear of the Black Organs, the paramilitary manifestation of the eviscerators that threaten to infect the nation. Islam's vibrant, ingenious construction sends the plot twisting down rabbit holes and caterwauling through secret doorways to emerge anywhere from a domestic living room, to a bomb technician's workshop to the deep recesses of the state's repressive political apparatus. An utterly remarkable debut, filled with original characters caught up in wonderfully imaginative circumstances and rendered in uniquely inventive language, Fire in the Unnameable Country is a book like no other. GHALIB ISLAM was born in Bangladesh and immigrated to Canada at age seven. He has a BA in Political Science from McMaster University, where he focused on international relations, and is a graduate of the University of Toronto's Creative Writing MA program, where he studied under Margaret Atwood.