PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIndeed, much of the novel’s narrative engagement comes more from the unfolding revelations about the characters’ back stories than from their current predicaments or occasional hopes for the future. For all its energetic storytelling and (frequent) crosscutting, the novel feels curiously static; we are told at the beginning that the mosque will burn and the crowds gather, and after 200 pages of foreshadowing this duly takes place. It feels as though Gunaratne wanted to sweep his readers up in a \'mad and furious\' rush of drama (and that semi-tautology in the novel’s title gives an indication of the elaborate prose he sometimes employs in pursuit of this drama), when in fact his strengths are in the quieter details—of personal stories, nuanced characterizations and especially in his multivocal breadth of register.
And it’s for those details that this book should be read. Gunaratne has a gift for inhabiting the lives of his characters, and has used that gift here to give voice to Londoners who are not often seen in contemporary fiction, and who will recognize themselves in this very fine novel—wearing the same trainers, speaking the same road slang, rolling out of the same school gates.\
