When I realised who the narrator was I was flicking back the pages to see what I had missed. I found this quite confusing, I don’t know the album so didn’t really understand the connection. These contradict the accounts from other people and there are constant references to The White Album by The Beatles. At first you don’t realise who this person is, just somebody a little annoying who places a few notes. And throughout the whole novel is a second narrator. The book is mainly about Thelonius, Fatima and Mike, how they connected and the consequences on their lives. I will say that it’s not the easiest novel that I’ve read, it was much easier to read with no background noise, that way I didn’t miss anything. Jihadi will probably be one of those novels that I will be thinking about long after I finished it. Complex, intriguing and intricately woven, this is an astonishing debut that explores the nature of good and evil alongside notions of nationalism, terrorism and fidelity, and, above all, the fragility of the human mind.

Peopled by a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters, whose reliability as narrators is always questioned, and with a multi-layered plot heaving with unexpected and often shocking developments, Jihadi: A Love Story is an intelligent thriller that asks big questions. As the story unravels, we are forced to assess the truth for ourselves, and decide not only what really happened on one fateful overseas assignment but who is the real terrorist. His memoir is in the hands of a brilliant but erratic psychologist who has an agenda of her own, and her annotations paint a much darker picture. A former intelligence agent stands accused of terrorism, held without charge in a secret overseas prison.

Jihadi by Yusuf Toropov