On 20 July Andy Burnham became Britain’s seventh prime minister in the decade since the 2016 Brexit referendum. He is the former mayor of Greater Manchester, a northern English region that is often patronised or written off. Yet, shortly before becoming PM, Burnham proudly announced that for some of his week he would rule from ‘No 10 North’ rather than London’s Downing Street.
Around the same time, 28-year-old Sufiyaan Salam’s debut, Wimmy Road Boyz, was published. It draws readers into an on- and offline world of diasporic and Subcontinental culture, language and literature, edible and capitalist consumption, and fraught gender and race relations. The novel’s “tweets [and] streets” cluster around Manchester’s Wilmslow Road. Although this area is historically known as the Curry Mile, a character observes that all the Arab restaurants now serving hungry customers there render the nickname irrelevant.
Salam’s three protagonists are upwardly-mobile Khan, philosophical artist Haris, and vulnerable lothario Immy. Friends since their college days, the men are in their early twenties and battle various demons. They spend the single night over which the text unfolds in a rented BMW, or “bimmer”, cruising these mean streets. While doing so, they listen to music, smoke sheesha and visit an eatery called ‘Tastes of Lahore.’ They chat “bakwaas”, or try to talk more seriously with each other.
Not only are his characters driven but Salam’s novel is too, taking readers on a wild ride along with the trio. Vaultingly ambitious, the book is mostly written in a distinctive ‘text-speak’ style, seldom using standard English. A Pakistani friend of my own age fretted she might be “too much of an auntie” to follow the plot because of its Gen-Z slang (though content is subsumed to form in these pages). However, I have sons in their late teens and early twenties who speak in the same northern youth argot. Thus I revelled in the text’s distinctive voice while not getting every allusion.
The characters’ SMS messages are peppered with emojis, capital letters are only used for proper nouns, and there is eloquent code-switching between English and Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic. There are traces here, probably unconscious, of Gautam Malkani’s so-called Londonstani style, or the Multicultural British English of Jade LB’s Keisha the Sket. Salam “shoot[s] out language like a machine gun” alongside his young, restless creations.
Salam’s prose is as lit and hyperreal (or sometimes surreal) as the Curry Mile. It also showcases his wide, expressive vocabulary. The book’s breathtaking collage encompasses the 12th-century Sufi allegorical poem The Conference of the Birds, modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf or Sajjad Zaheer and Sa’adat Hasan Manto, and the present-day Muslim canon of Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid.
If the references are intertextual they are also intermedial. Wimmy Road Boyz is packed with cultural and media texture, from mafia film The Godfather (1972) to “Nusrat to Ghetts to Metz n Trix.” Within this short phrase, we see the tradition of Pakistani qawwali, the gritty artistry of London Grime, and the dynamism of Manchester-based bhangra.
In an interview, Salam told me, “I like all of these forms, and taken together they present a thesis of what I think the novel should be.” A hat-tip to another classic movie Pakeezah (also 1972, but from Bollywood rather than Hollywood), via the name of Immy’s most significant ex-girlfriend, spins out into something more suggestive and “apna” [ours] by way of Urdu calligraphy and lyrics from the film’s songs.
Through a range of literary techniques, Salam’s Muslim characters contend with the burden of history and sedimented stereotypes. The novel is alert to the residues of Empire, Partition’s pain, and the contemporary fascism that the boys speculate might lead to a “brown holocaust.” Meanwhile, satire and slapstick comedy unsettle familiar tropes (Salam shared, “I’ll leave readers to discover for themselves how I approach the subject of cousin marriage”). The techniques include dialogue occasionally being presented in the form of short plays (which also happens in some Urdu fiction), embedded poems, interviews, and even Salam’s pastiche of an Oasis song.
Salam’s translanguaging evinces a fresh literary vernacular. His novel refuses the idea that serious literature must be written in singular, standardised English. Its linguistic excesses reflect the realities of contemporary urban Britain. Salam’s characters don’t translate themselves for a mainstream audience, swaggering insouciantly through these pages. As he put it, “Maybe Muslims or Pakistani culture or whatever is scary in the eyes of right-wing tabloid readers in the UK, but to me, my cultural heritage is cool. It’s cool and I should brag about how cool it is.”
Wilmslow Road isn’t just a backdrop. Like Joyce’s Dublin or Woolf’s or Zaheer’s London, Salam turns an urban landscape into a living, moving muse. The fast-changing Curry Mile, with its Pakistani, Arab, white English and global denizens, resists fixed ideas of ethnicity and belonging. Salam limns the metropolis’s constant reinvention through migration, hustle, and laconic self-belief.
Wimmy Road Boyz focalises sex and violence in the city through men in turmoil. Immy’s romantic intensity veers between tenderness and selfish immaturity. Haris’ lip service to gender equality sits uneasily with his actions towards his fiancée. Khan’s claimed religious restraint conceals insecurity and possible attraction to online misogyny. Salam avoids easy condemnation of these young men, tracking the forces that shape them.
The protagonists’ struggles don’t altogether obscure the women impacted by them. These women are vocalised in second-person modes of address that echo Hamid’s ‘you’ in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Lyrical passages, featuring an anti-rape protest and punctuated by lines from Kishwar Naheed and spoken word poetry, hint at their complexity and strength. I would have liked to hear more from the promising female characters.
Salam’s version of Burnham’s Manchesterism is unashamedly yet unconventionally Muslim and multilingual. His digitally networked and globally connected vision of cultural decentralisation clashes with nostalgic post-Brexit ideas of Britain. The novel demonstrates that ‘the north’ is neither peripheral nor monolithic. And Salam reestablishes Manchester as one of the world’s great literary capitals.
Raise voice with our heroes, “oi, oi, oi!”
The columnist is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York in the UK, and author of five books.
Bluesky: @clarachambara
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 2nd, 2026
