Alif the Unseen

Alif is a grey-hat hacker in an unnamed Gulf emirate, selling protection to Islamists, communists, pornographers and anyone else the state censor is hunting, and he is not especially interested in any of their politics. Then Intisar, the aristocratic girl he has been seeing in secret, is betrothed to another man and tells him never to contact her again. Alif writes a piece of software that can identify a user by the texture of their typing, so that his systems will never see her, and in doing so builds something the state's chief censor, known as the Hand, wants very much. Intisar also sends him a book: the Alf Yeom, the Thousand and One Days, said to have been dictated by the jinn. Hunted out of his flat, Alif goes underground with his neighbour Dina, a convert American academic and a bad-tempered creature called Vikram, and discovers that the unseen world has its own quarters of the city and that the Hand has been there before him. Wilson wrote it as the Arab Spring was breaking, and it moves at thriller speed while arguing seriously about metaphor, code, faith and what a text can be made to do.