uy Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was set in the council estates and migrant enclaves of a London that few politicians acknowledge, and in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 killing of soldier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian converts to Islam. A literary La Haine, owing more to Wiley than to Peter Ackroyd, it presented the capital as noise: Lon-din, a city contaminated by an imperial past, where “constant, punishing memories are