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In this blistering debut novel, author Adnan Khan investigates themes of race, class, masculinity and contemporary relationships. Omar Ali, twenty-seven-year-old line cook and petty criminal, gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend's father at work, informing Omar that Anna has committed suicide. Unable to process or articulate his grief, and suffering from insomnia, Omar embarks on a quest to obtain her suicide note from her elusive parents. As he unravels, Omar finds himself getting involved in break-ins, online terrorism, dealing with the police, and losing his best friend as he becomes less recognizable.
There Has to Be a Knife examines expectations -- both intimate and political -- on brown men, exploring ideas of cultural identity and the tropes we use to represent them.
There Has to Be a Knife examines expectations -- both intimate and political -- on brown men, exploring ideas of cultural identity and the tropes we use to represent them.
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Reviews
"A powerful look at violence, loss, racism, and toxic masculinity."
Book Riot
"Like a sort of Notes from Underground for the hip-hop generation, Adnan Khan's darkly funny, compulsively readable, and deceptively moving first novel stares headlong into the struggles of its young characters and the harm they cause to others and themselves. In raw, streetwise vernacular, There Has to Be a Knife offers an acute study of toxic masculinity, of the ways in which unexpressed grief s
Pasha Malla, author of Fugue States
"A searing meditation on isolation and grief in the modern world. There Has to Be A Knife is a striking debut."
Iain Reid, author of Foe and I'm Thinking of Ending Things