Jihadi: A Love Story, which reached the quarter-finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, is his first novel. He lives in Ireland, and seeks to create ‘the possibility of harmonious acceptance in the Middle East, USA and Europe via literature and a global conversation about coexistence’.
Complex, intriguing and intricately woven, this is an astonishing debut that explores the nature of good and evil alongside notions of nationalism, terrorism and fidelity, and, above all, the fragility of the human mind.
Can you tell us a little bit about your debut novel Jihadi: A Love Story?
It's about a former US intelligence agent accused of terrorism and held in a secret overseas prison. His memoir, discovered in his prison cell after his death, suggests a more complex picture. A series of annotations to his manuscript, from a brilliant but erratic psychologist, purports to set the record straight once and for all.
Where did the inspiration come from to include two different competing threads to the narrative?
I'm a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov, and the preface to Lolita was a big influence, as were the notes from the academic in Pale Fire.
Can you describe Jihadi in one sentence?
Yeats once observed that ‘All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions’, and though I read that quote after finishing the novel, I think it's a pretty good summary of the book.
How did your writing journey start?
I've been writing plays, poems, or fiction since I was about fifteen. I had a great high-school English teacher, David Esselstron, who gave me extra credit for finishing what I now know was a really terrible play. I pulled my first all-nighter working on that play. That was the point at which I caught the writing bug.
How long did it take to write Jihadi before you submitted it to your agent/publisher?
I started it in 2007. I made the final revisions to the version I sent out to Bob Diforio, who became my agent, in 2014. The first five years were terrible. I had a good opening, but I kept waiting for inspiration to strike. Actually, what I was doing was avoiding finishing it so that I wouldn't have to be held accountable for the quality of the piece. I had to decide to move into the risky area of taking action every day to get it across the finish line, even if I didn't feel particularly inspired. I started taking daily word counts seriously toward the end of 2012, and that's when the novel finally started to come together.
