I am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes

What a read! I don't know where to begin from. I picked up this recommendation from twitter and was surprised that is was not a recent publication but way back in 2014. I loved the premise, where some seemingly disparate incidents in Syria, Manhattan, Saudi Arabia had some kind of connection and it was upto this man who called him "The Pilgrim" to make this journey and find out the truth.

It is a hefty book at 700+ pages but once I got in, what a ride it was. It is not so much about how brilliant the story is, but more a case of how brilliant the storytelling is. The voice and the way we are taking through a childhood tragedy in Saudi Arabia or a random police investigation in Turkey for me it was the places that did it. 

One minute I was walking down the streets to the World Trade Centre memorial, the next minute I was in Lebanon, travelling through the Hindu Kush mountains, I had never been to these places in fiction. That was what kept it going for me.

Secondly it was the voice as well. There was something dispassionate about the voice that fills the reader in about Pilgrim and Saracen, two personas who are similar and yet different. I loved the way these characters, their backstories which is so comprehensive that I felt like I lived in their heads. Hayes' knowledge of the Muslim world, his explanation for their actions come across as so genuine that it feels like a great privilege to be reading this novel from a storyteller like him.

By the time I finished this one, I was happy to discover that it carried chapters from Hayes' next one too. The Year of the Locust. Cannot wait to read that one!