When readers first meet seventeen-year-old Muslim biracial Khayyam Maquet on the first page of Samira Ahmed’s latest YA novel, ‘Mad Bad & Dangerous to Know’, she’s in Paris, on her family’s annual month-long stay in the City of Love ‘staring at her phone screen, looking for love but knowing it’s not going to show up’. Khayyam’s life is in teen chaos: she’s unsure where she stands with her boyfriend Zaid, her submission for an essay contest on a lost Delacroix painting gifted to Alexandre Dumas supposedly screwed up her chances of getting into her dream college, she’s ‘captive’ in a humid city in which ‘air-conditioning is mostly aspirational’ and her best friend Julie is on a ‘dark-ages, technology-free’ family holiday and is thus unreachable. Essentially, where Kayyam would rather be is at home, in Chicago, ‘stewing in self-doubt and woe-is-me pity’.

The author, Nejoud Al-Yagout, spins a psychologically charged tale, 'When the Haboob Sings', around the consequences individuals in a hypocritical society face when they dare to be themselves or to say what they think. All it took in the case of the novel’s protagonist, Dunya Khair, was one article –an ‘unsafe’ one – to create an uproar in a society dominated by its male counterparts, used to shuttering away female dissent. Ironically, when her controversial article is published, it barely causes a ripple in the echelons, until a male cleric responds to it, propelling her into notoriety. She is faced with the dissolution of familial ties, the collapse of her sham marriage, a looming nervous breakdown and solitary imprisonment in a filthy cell where readers meet her for the first time at the start of the book.