The global financial crisis of 2007-08, the consequences of the "war on terror" and racial and religious politics in the West in the last decade form the crux of a novel by a Bangladesh-born writer, who worked as an investment banker on Wall Street.
Britain-based Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel "In the Light of What We Know" is set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.
Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, the novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching 40, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse.
In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
The protagonist in the novel, published by Pan Macmillan India imprint Picador India, is Zafar.
"Like Zafar, I was a student of mathematics at Oxford, but that, to put it imprecisely, was the beginning and the end of what we had in common. Mine was a privileged background. My father was born into a well-known landed family in Pakistan, where he met and married my mother," the narrator says in the opening chapter of the book.
"From there, the newlyweds went to Princeton, where they had me, making me an American citizen, and where my father obtained his doctorate before moving to Oxford so that he could take up a chair in physics. I am no genius and I know that without the best English schooling, I would not have been able to make as much as I have of the opportunities that came my way," he says.
