Review | Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam: three young men and a night to remember

In his debut novel Wimmy Road Boyz, Sufiyaan Salam takes the oft-repeated (and frankly, Anglocentric) dictum “show, don’t tell” to its most creative conclusion: crafting prose that not only narrates a story but is also self-reflexive about the very act of narration itself.

The Manchester-based author writes in a multilingual, conversational mode that mirrors the internal and external linguistic landscape inhabited by his British Pakistani characters. The story opens with the introduction of 22-year-old Immy, described as “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”. He is meeting up with 23-year-old Khan, a “cambridge-educated paki… the type to recite Warren Buffet epigrams like they’re hadiths” and Haris, also 23, an ever-anxious, soon-to-be-wed artist who is perpetually grappling with the ways in which his faith can come into conflict with his art and who is prone to philosophical asides about the larger meaning of life.