In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne  Girls, football and music are the distractions and saving graces in three young men’s lives in the gritty, violent and tension-filled shadows of the towers of Stones Estate in North London. Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf just want to get together to play football and find a way out. Selvon trains -runs, boxes, presses the bench in a bid to make a university on the sports team. Arden has a secret dream to make his beats a musical career, and Yusuf wants to be invisible to the eyes of his Muslim community. In Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, long-listed for the Man Booker, short-listed for the Goldsmith’s Prize, three voices meld, declaring their friendship against the growing tensions of race riots, poverty, extremism and raw edges. “Our friendships we called our bloods and our homes our Ends….Our combs cut lines in our hair and we scarred our eyebrows with blades….Close without touch…. In our caustic speech we threw out platitudes, in our guts our feisty wit. It was like we lived upon jagged teeth in the dark, in this bone-cold London city.” The language, with its slang and dialect which draws on grime (music) and sassy vibes, hums along, spits and hollers with the voices of the three young men, giving the text authenticity as well as an edgy structure, building to a crescendo over the two days of the book. Alongside the voices of these three compelling young men are two from the generation of their parents: Nelson, father to Selvon, from Montserrat, and Caroline, single alcoholic mother of Ardan, from Belfast. Each has their own story of oppression and resistance - of violence and pain - creating layers of history that parallel contemporary issues as well as digging deep into constructs of prejudice that have never resolved. In this post-9/11 world where the economy bites and prejudice is rife, the melting pot of London is under pressure. When white supremacists fuel race hatred, and the radicalisation of the local Mosque forces out moderate voices, tensions mount and the three friends find themselves in the middle of a dangerous world - a world that was a safe haven, that was their home. This is a provocative novel that doesn’t shy away from the attitudes of young men, their desperate desires and self-absorption, and shows their world as it is - tough and vicious. Yet there is hope in this seemingly dangerous situation: each of the friends care, and care deeply, about each other and about their families. They are determined to survive and be true to themselves, to remain untouched by rhetoric even in the face of extreme pressure and confusion. Gunaratne explores these complex themes with agility and sensitivity. The strength of the novel lies not so much in its telling but in the way in which this author writes - his words riff off the page, with the rhythm of the dialogue and the lively, and at times beautiful, descriptions of a place that represents oppression, fear and desperation, to let us open a window into a world which may be foreign to us - to enable us to understand the choices people make and the repercussions that follow them.