'A compassionate, beautifully told portrait' Guy Gunaratne
'Absorbing, witty, eloquent fiction, as well as a trenchant political critique' Tom Benn
'A hymn to empathy, alive with care and love' Rebecca Watson
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 JHALAK PRIZE
Jamila Shah is twenty-nine and exhausted.
An immigration solicitor tasked with running the precious family law firm, Jamila is prone to being woken in the middle of the night by frantic phone calls from clients on the cusp of deportation. Working under the shadow of the government's 'hostile environment', she constantly prays and hopes that their 'determinations' will result in her clients being allowed to stay.
With no time for friends, family or even herself (never mind a needy partner), Jamila's life feels hectic and out of control. Then a breakdown of sorts forces her to seek change - to pursue her own happiness while navigating the endless expectations that the world seems to have of her, and still committing herself to a career devoted to helping others.
In this assured and character-driven debut, we meet the staff of Shah & Co Solicitors, who themselves arrived in the UK not too long ago, and their clients, more recent arrivals - all trying to achieve some semblance of normality. TAWSEEF KHAN is a qualified immigration solicitor and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Liverpool, where he examined the fairness of the British asylum system. He is also a graduate of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia, where he received the Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary. His fiction has appeared in Lighthouse and Test Signal: a Northern anthology; his non-fiction in the New York Times, The Face and Hyphen. His debut non-fiction book Muslim, Actually was published by Atlantic in 2021. He lives in Manchester. Tawseef Khan's powerful debut, Determination, is both an exploration of the UK immigration system and the story of one woman's attempt to find a life for herself amidst the pressures of her job Determination will appeal to readers of politically engaged contemporary fiction with a strong ensemble cast - fans of Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne, Diana Evans's Ordinary People, and The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohammed. Tawseef Khan is himself a qualified immigration solicitor and has a PhD on the subject of the experience of queer asylum-seekers in the British system
