Short Synopsis
A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.

Full Synopsis
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.

In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope—from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton—and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor seeks atonement, and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world—and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.

"Beautifully written and renewed evidence that some of the most interesting writing in English is coming from the edges of old empires." ---Kirkus Starred Review

"[Rahman's] fascination with mathematics and the universe of ideas is contagious, and enriches the complex narrative about how we know the reality around us. . . . This ambitious debut novel has considerable depth and scope." ---Library Journal Starred Review

Kirkus Review

Library Journal Review