Godzilla and the Song Bird

Set in the period before and through the Bangladeshi war of independence, this novel has at its heart the continuing friendship between three boys with a love of cinema, whose loyalty into adulthood has surprising outcomes. Bulbul, the central character, is a journalist who witnesses and experiences the clash between individual struggles for meaning in a world torn apart by war, genocide and religious exclusions. This is a novel that has everything: tenderness, humour, sadness, satire, horror, tension and release. Scene after scene of brilliant storytelling drives the narrative, revealing truths about the difficult emergence of a postcolonial society and reflecting on the nature of storytelling as a characteristic of Bengali culture – a double-edged one because stories can both evade and uncover buried secrets.

Manzu Islam was born in 1953 in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) where he lived through the 1971 war, walking the swamps for weeks to reach the refugee camps in India, then returning to fight as a freedom fighter. He came to England as a political refugee and, after studying for a degree and working as a racial harassment officer in East London, he became interested in writing. He has published four well-received earlier books.