For our Author of the Month feature this month we welcome debut author Yasmin Cordery Khan. Masterfully switching between two time frames twenty years apart, Yasmin Cordery Khan's 'riveting, smartly-written debut', Edgware Road is a 'gripping family mystery with emotional depth and intriguing social context'. 

Yasmin Cordery Khan is an historian and broadcaster. She is the author of The Great Partition (for which she won the Gladstone Prize for History), and The Raj at War, and has written for the Guardian and the Observer. Edgware Road is her first novel.

It's been fascinating to hear about the genesis of Edgware Road, and to gain some insight into Yasmin's path to becoming a fiction author. If you're still looking for more, you can find Yasmin Cordery Khan in conversation with Joanne Owen on the LoveReading LitFest.

What was your favourite book from childhood and do you still have it?

As a child I loved some pretty tatty books from jumble stalls and car-boot sales; Little Women, and anything by Enid Blyton. I barely owned any books until my twenties as I didn’t have the money to buy them; even as an undergraduate at Oxford I still borrowed everything from a library. 

When did you first start writing and what made you think, ‘I want to be an author’?

I’ve always written fiction. I was quite shy as a child but writing felt like a way of being heard, and of speaking up, as if I could say things that I couldn’t articulate in person. I published poetry as a student and was accepted onto the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, but ended up going down a different path.  

Can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Does it vary when you’re writing fiction vs non-fiction?

There’s something eerily familiar and yet completely different about the two forms. Like non-identical twins. Having written non-fiction helped with the idea of crafting a narrative arc, how to deal with some of the technical aspects of writing, and I knew what it felt like to keep producing words on the page. Writing history books I’ve always been very careful with sources and footnotes; there is nothing like the freedom of just being able to make stuff up. 

Was there a “eureka!” moment that sparked the idea for Edgware Road? Did it have a long gestation period?

I usually take the train back home from Paddington if I am in London, and one evening I got off the tube early at Edgware Road and started taking photographs of the street and the shopfronts in the dark - signs for massage parlours, money transfer, halal cafes. That felt like something starting.

 

How long was the process for you, from starting Edgware Road through to being told you had a publishing deal?

I wrote pretty intensively for 18 months then submitted the book to my agent in February 2020, about a week before Covid broke. The publishing deal with Head of Zeus was on the table within a year, which sounds rapid, though of course it didn’t feel like that at the time.  

Can you show us a photograph that sums up your time as a debut author? 

Sorry, not really, it’s all been snatches of time grabbed in a tiny attic study, when not looking after my children, students and cats throughout the pandemic. No glamour!

Can you share any real-life events that play a part in the story? How did you research the banking world, and Khalid’s gambling addiction?

I read books, reports and newspaper articles about gambling addiction. There have been a lot of good non-fiction books about the BCCI banking scandal, for instance, False Profits by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin. The banking backstory was fiendishly complicated and I didn’t want to overload the plot. I also found Hansard, and reports from the US Congress, one by Senator John Kerry, and the Bingham report from the British government, pretty helpful in trying to piece things together. And then there’s obviously also a lot of me in the book too, for instance, experiences of grief, having lost both my parents quite young. 

The plotting of Edgware Road is impeccable! Did you always plan to have two distinct timeframes? How challenging was it to structure them? 

Thank you for that question! I always had the two timelines, one in the 2000s and one in the 1980s, but I hadn’t definitively decided on dates, ages and locations and how they would inter-relate. Basically, I caused myself a lot of angst by not making some decisions about the timelines earlier on, and that was like untying a twisted note in the final edit. Lesson learned. 

Which characters were trickiest to write?

I thought that the real-life arms-dealer Adnan Khashoggi was going to feature more centrally in the book; I didn’t want him to be a pastiche of a rich Arab, though, and ended up cutting some long sections involving his house on Park Lane, full of antiques and tiger rugs. I read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which is such a magnificent book about the 1980s, and there’s that very brief appearance of Margaret Thatcher in one scene, where she dances with the protagonist, just for 3 or 4 pages, and realised, yes, a real person can appear in a novel, but a little can go a long way. 

Did you always know how Alia would handle meeting the man who was there when her father died?

Alia handled that meeting completely differently in the first draft; she was less passionate, less bloody furious. After some discussion with my brilliant editor, Clare Gordon, I had a rush of inspiration and wrote, quite quickly, I think, a more powerful ending to the whole book. 

What do you hope readers take from reading Edgware Road?

It’s such a pleasure just to be read, and people can take what they want. But there are some thoughts in there – about what it means to be English, about class, about the importance of money, about how all our lives are shaped by global forces. So I hope some of that comes across, that it’s ‘outside the whale’, so to speak, in Rushdie’s famous formulation of political writing, as well as a yarn about the intensity of the father-daughter relationship between Khalid and Alia.

What is next for you in terms of writing?

I’m writing a novel about a group of friends on the 1970s hippy trail to India. Thousands of people travelled overland from London by jeep and bus, and it’s incredible that young people could just tip up in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan for the price of a bus ticket. Those journeys are completely impossible nowadays. The novel is about the complicated friendships that develop along the way, but also the lives back in England that the characters are running away from. 

If you enjoyed this, click here to take a look at our other 'Author Talk' blog posts.