The Iliad, The Odyssey and the Rubaiyat, not to mention Romeo and Juliet, Lolita, and Madame Bovary are all alluded to Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s latest instalment of the adventures of Bani Adam, THE OTHER HALF OF YOU.

First met in THE TRIBE and thrillingly examined in THE LEBS, Bani is now a university graduate and eligible bachelor ready to amalgamate with a young female Alawite.

Trouble is, he is in love with Sahara, a Christian, a worrisome ‘word worshipper’. Not a good situation as tradition in the tribe dictates that marriage must be within the tribe.

Two sides of tradition – the solid, the steadfast, the stalwart vs the intractable, the stick in the mud – push and pull Bani, bending him this way and that, windswept on the cliffs of conflict, the whale of his heart and intellect beached, relationships risked with shipwreck.

A romantic at heart with the soul of a philosopher, culture, honour and identity are part of his ongoing tussle with his past, present and future.

“Following three years of university, filled with wealthy Caucasian academics who said things like ‘race is a construct’, I craved the vernacular of my days at Punchbowl Boys High School.”

Frustrated at his family’s inability to embrace his education, he was equally critical of the fact that his education had been Whitewashed – a Lebbo who was caught between Arab ignorance and White arrogance.

Feeling like a camel caught in the eye of an hourglass, Bani acquiesces to marry Alawite teen, Fatima, whose fractious relationship with her father makes marriage to anyone desirable. “I would rather live under the roof of a soft cock than the roof of a hard cunt” she confides to the benevolent Bani.

Dutiful Bani makes a valiant attempt to settle into married life as mapped out by his parents but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot convince himself that he was in love.

Ink, as Bani tells us, is his first love. Thirst for the black ink you find on a cream coloured page. The library was his first approximation to libido. “Ink….It had filled my veins. And ever since I felt it surging inside me, desperate to explode all over the pages.”

Like The Lebs, everything about THE OTHER HALF OF YOU is impressive, the way Ahmad creates scenes, moods, character with a fiercely tender lyricism at its core.

THE OTHER HALF OF YOU by Michael Mohammed Ahmad is published by Hachette.