The Silent Minaret

Who knew Issa Shamsuddin? Is his disappearance a matter of choice – the next step in a journey of self-imposed exile? Or are there more sinister forces at play? Set in the Western Cape in the years leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and in the temporary bedsits and hookah cafes of post-September 11 London.

Daring in both form and content, this novel of belief and betrayal shuttles between two connected moments in history and two countries linked by their colonial past and globalized present. The friends of a young student who has gone missing try to reconstruct his life as they search for him, and what emerges is a picture of a man insisting on a common humanity and finding ways to unify ideologies even as his world is being divided.