Sufiyaan Salam’s raucous night out

Photograph by Suki Dhanda for The Observer

“Oi, oi, oi!” calls the narrator of Wimmy Road Boyz on the book’s first page, initiating an excitable tone that barely lets up until the very last. Twenty-eight-year-old Sufiyaan Salam’s raucous debut novel begins at precisely 7.34pm, as three British-Pakistani men in their early 20s drive towards Manchester’s Wilmslow Road and its Curry Mile in a rented “bimmer” (BMW).

The three men are friends who met at college. Immy is “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”, Salam writes – and indeed we soon flashback to a scene of him waking up from a drunken sexual encounter next to a woman whom he eventually recognises as his cousin. Meanwhile, Khan, back home in between finishing his Cambridge degree and starting a London graduate job at the world’s “second-most ethical consulting group”, is “suited and gucci-booted; the type to recite Warren Buffett epigrams like they’re hadiths”. And then there’s Haris, the most introspective of the trio, who sits in the back seat, chewing “a harmonica-solo into his fingernails, his being a mind that never switches off, philosophy subreddits doing bares”.

Blackburn-based Salam – who won the Stormzy-backed Merky Books New Writers’ prize and is an Observer debut novelist of the year – writes in a vivid prose bursting with slang and references both highfalutin’ and street. He dispenses with capitals other than for character names and often skips into sections of verse, at one point rewriting Oasis’s Wonderwall to tell the story of a predicament Haris faces, at another constructing a shape poem to illustrate Immy urinating. 

Salam is also a screenwriter, and he uses techniques from the film and television worlds, presenting some dialogue in script form and having the narrator direct the action with close-ups and whip pans. The frenzy of the action and the emcee-like narrator’s urgency will make you want to read this book at high speed, but slow down and you’ll appreciate the fearless inventiveness of Salam’s craft.

Our trio are headed for a big night out, complete with alcohol, drugs, sex and violence. But each of them is also keeping an awful secret. Because of Salam’s all-guns-blazing style, these matters at first seem part of the joke, troubles that have come about at least in part thanks to the men’s own shortcomings: Immy is still heartbroken over his ex; Khan is mixed up with a drug dealer; and Haris wants to break off his engagement. But in chapters that zoom into the heads of each man in turn, Salam shows that each of these issues is not as simple as you might expect; that each of these young men is weighed down by a dark and heavy backstory – some involving unconscionable trauma.

Salam’s real subject is, of course, toxic masculinity and the harm it brings by preventing men from speaking openly about their emotions. Although Immy, Khan and Haris are supposedly best friends, they feel unable to tell one another what they are going through – until, for more than one of them, it’s too late. Over the course of the novel’s one night, as they get in and out of the bimmer for refreshments at shisha bars and jalebi cafes, they start to open up. “For me, it’s better to let it all stay with me, inside. keeps it small, innit,” says Khan, explaining his preference for bottling up his feelings, in some of the plainest lines in the book. 

This is a daring, properly funny, poignant novel about young, multicultural British manhood, weakened only ever so slightly by a handful of chapters that venture too far into the lives of peripheral characters. But Wimmy Road Boyz is above all a feat of exceptional stamina that hollers, yells and blares the arrival of a wild new literary talent.

Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam is published by Merky Books (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £14.44 (15% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply