A suicide bombing is being planned in Manchester, and Saleem Khan, an atheist, seventy years of age, is carrying the bomb. Also concealed on his person is a cache of vivid, haunting memories - some of regret and yearning, some humorous, others over-shadowed by the brutality of war. Award-winning novelist Tariq Mehmood plunges the reader into the dizzying saga of Saleem's incendiary history.

In the 1960s, he left his lover, his job as a teacher and his home in rural Pakistan and emigrated to Bradford, a town crackling with racism. He found a job in a mill on an all-Asian night shift. He became an active trade unionist and later, when the mills closed down, drove a taxi. But inevitably he is impelled to return to Pakistan.

From Pakistan, Saleem is drawn across the border into the killing fields of Afghanistan. Among Russian soldiers and the holy warriors of the Mujahadeen, he meets Gulzarina, the woman whose life and experiences promise to make sense of Saleem's own tortuous history.

TARIQ MEHMOOD is an award-winning novelist and documentary filmmaker. His first novel, Hand on the Sun, was about a young immigrant to the UK experiencing racism in the 1970s and '80s. He is the Co-director of the multiple-award-winning documentary Injustice, which is about people who have died in British police custody. Mehmood teaches at the American University of Beirut.