Complex 90

The City Always Wins is a remarkable novel from the psychological heart of a revolution. From the communal highs of pitched night battles against the police in Cairo to the solitary lows of defeated exile in New York, Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut is a unique immersion into one of the key chapters of the 21st century.

Bringing to life the 2011 Egyptian revolution, The City Always Wins conveys with extraordinary intensity all the stages of that place and that time through the lives of its two main characters Mariam and Khalil, ordinary young people caught up in an extraordinary moment.

Furthermore, The City Always Wins is a novel not just about Egypt’s revolution but about a global generation that tried to change the world.

Reminiscent of the writing of Jeet Thayil, Zia Haider Rahma and Nadeem Aslam, Hamilton’s prose is arrestingly visual, intensely lyrical and uncompromisingly political. A genuinely exciting new writer, he looks set to become a defining voice of his generation.

Mukesh Agarwal sits alone in the Black Eagle pub unaware that a riot is brewing or that Billy, his youngest son, is still out on his bike…. A mile away in the family home in Church Street, Anila, the youngest of the three Agarwal girls, is reading Smash Hits and listening to Radio One as she sprawls across the bottom bunk unaware of the tragic loss that is about to hit the family…. It is 1981, factories are closing, unemployment is high, the NF are marching and the neglected inner cities are ablaze as riots breakout across Thatcher’s fractured Britain. The Agarwals are facing their own personal nightmare but their pain is eased by family, friendships and a community that refuses to disappear. THE HANDSWORTH TIMES is abook about loss, friendship and working together because there is such a thing as society.