Red Birds - Hardcover

A thrilling, razor-sharp critique of US foreign policy . Hanif is dextrous and ambitious with the literary tools of both east and west . Combine this with humour as cutting as Heller or Evelyn Waugh, as precise and modern as Sam Lipsyte or Wells Tower, and you have something highly original . Red Birds is an incisive, unsparing critique of war and of America's role in the destruction of the Middle East. It combines modern and ancient farcical traditions in thrilling way (Dina Nayeri Guardian)

A savagely surreal satire of US foreign policy (Justine Jordan Guardian, Books of the Year)

Defiant . The outrage is all too real (Sunday Times)

A blistering, savage, tragicomic satire about the cruelty of war and the impossibility of peace . Hanif writes of violence and bitterness with flashes of hilarity that underline his anger and his humanity

(The Times)

A novel at once funny, sad and disturbing (Mail on Sunday)

Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds is a marvel, describing the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape - and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts (Pankaj Mishra Guardian, Summer Reading 2018)

An acutely observed refugee tale . Both achingly realistic and elusively metaphysical . Irreverent, dripping with exuberant disdain for the way in which western power has corrupted the world . an effective satire that reminds us that everybody - refugees, distraught mothers, unthinking airmen, well-meaning aid workers, dogs and ghosts - has a need to love, and be loved (Ben East Observer)

Hanif has a talent for taking the most serious subjects - convoluted wars or paranoid dictators - and, in a style indebted to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, emphasising their fundamental absurdity through satire ... Hanif's authorial gifts are undeniable and Red Birds is written with ambition and powerful satirical anger (Literary Review)

Like a highly charged political chamber opera (Claire Armitstead Guardian)

His new novel, set in and around a refugee camp, exhibits his trademark black comedy . an absurdist riff on modern conflict with shades of Catch-22 (Guardian, Best books of autumn 2018)