Picture three British Pakistani friends in their early twenties cruising down Manchester’s infamous Curry Mile — a.k.a. Wimmy Road, a.k.a. Wilmslow Road — about to embark on a lads’ night out in the North of England’s biggest halal food spot.
There is heartbroken Immy, post-breakup, after losing the love of his life, convincing himself that meaningless flings will help block out the pain.
Then there is Khan, a Cambridge graduate about to start his dream job, still grieving the death of his brother while juggling a risky side hustle that could jeopardise everything.
Finally, there is Haris, who, of the three, appears the most sensitive and the most pious. Just days away from marrying the perfect Muslim woman, he suddenly gets cold feet.
All three harbour secrets — secrets they are on the cusp of divulging. They wish they could be vulnerable with each other, but they do not want to break the thin shield of manhood or ruin their first night out together in ages. What they do not know is that this could be their last night.
This is the premise of London-based screenwriter Sufiyaan Salam ’s blazing debut novel, Wimmy Road Boyz , which won chart-topping UK rap artist Stormzy’s #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize in 2024 , resulting in a traditional publishing deal.
The novel turns everything we think we know — our often biased, misguided and media-fuelled assumptions — about Northern Muslim South Asian men on its head.
“I remember going on a night out with two Muslim Asian friends for the first time after the COVID-19 lockdown,” Sufiyaan recalls. “I was going through emotional turmoil in my own life at the time, and I felt like I really wanted to talk to these guys about it, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t necessarily out of fear or embarrassment. I remember thinking, ‘If I talk about this now, it’s going to dampen the whole night'.”
“The next day, I thought it would be interesting if the two guys I was with were also dealing with something similar and felt the exact same way,” he continues. “It struck me as an absurd image: three people who all really want to talk to each other about something deep, but just cannot.” Turning one night into 350 pages The 350-page novel spans four-and-a-half hours over the course of a single night, with scenes cutting between the present and the past.
In the present, the trio are stuck in a traffic jam, tongues teetering on the edge of confession before deciding against it. This is also where Khan is carrying out a drug run, where the friends grab late-night munch, and where they get into bust-ups with strangers — and with each other. Then there are the flashbacks, in which Sufiyaan gradually builds each protagonist’s story arc.
The novel’s structure is atypical, and that is one of the most enjoyable aspects of reading it. There is a strong sense of flow between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, even when the story shifts between timelines.
Sufiyaan says he has enjoyed writing in different mediums since childhood, and this is reflected in the novel, which blends prose, poetry, script dialogue, lyrics and onomatopoeia.
This variety in style helps create the emotional highs and lows of the protagonists while ramping up the momentum as the night unfolds. He says the writing process was organic; he had fun writing the book and wanted the experience to feel equally engaging for readers.
“It was less about making something that felt cinematic and more about wanting the book to feel alive in lots of ways, with lots of textures,” he says. “I wanted it to feel musical and literary, but also fun and silly. I was also inspired by rap — Kendrick Lamar in particular.” More than labels One aspect of Wimmy Road Boyz that stands out is its use of the vernacular spoken by millennial and Gen-Z South Asians in the North of England, reminiscent of the style of award-winning British author Zadie Smith . There are long-held stereotypes surrounding both Northern dialects and the way British South Asians speak, and Sufiyaan says he was conscious of those perceptions while writing.
“Around the time I had the idea for the book, I had started reading Ulysses and had gone to see British Pakistani rapper Frenzo Harami in concert,” Sufiyaan remembers. “The language of James Joyce’s prose and Frenzo Harami collided in my head. It felt like a cool energy for how I would write a novel about three young British Muslim men from the North of England. Writer Derek Owusu calls it ‘multicultural English’, which I quite like.”
He adds, “For me, it was the voices as I heard them. It’s a slight exaggeration of how the boys and I back home in Blackburn would speak to each other. What I also wanted to do was make it highly literary, where you have the characters talking about Aristotle or using language you might find in Dickens or Shakespeare.
"I wanted it to reflect the musicality of how a lot of people my age speak, while also showing them to be intelligent, nuanced and poetic. I felt like the language had this crazy energy.”
In sharing this, Sufiyaan explains that when he first came up with the novel, he made a list of the stereotypes and common ideas people in Britain have about people from the North of England, Muslim men, and Muslims in general.
“I was almost assigning these traits to the characters and then thinking of ways to subvert them,” he says.
At its core, however, Sufiyaan says the novel is a reflection of the complex young men he grew up with and the many layers they carry within themselves.
Of the three protagonists, it is Khan who deals drugs, yet he does not fit the profile British society often imagines when thinking about drug dealers in the North of England. He went to Cambridge, quotes philanthropists, and has White Oxbridge friends.
There is also much more to Immy than the Playboy persona he projects: a mother and sister who left home when he was a child, and a heart irrevocably broken when the woman he planned a future with ends their relationship.
And Haris, the most politely spoken of the trio — the one who appears to be the 'rightly guided Muslim' — is quietly wrestling with doubts about his faith.
“I am conscious of all the tropes that hang over our heads,” says Sufiyaan. “But I also didn’t want to make it just about that. A lot of what happens in the book could still have happened if they weren’t brown or Muslim. It’s just that the specific texture their Muslimness and British Asianness gives the characters makes it slightly more dramatic and interesting.”
“Growing up, when I used to write stories, they always had White characters,” he adds. “I feel like every writer of colour has this revelation at some point where they think, ‘Wait a minute, I can actually write about people like me.’” The shadow of the manosphere Sufiyaan wrote the novel in the early 2020s, before the manosphere entered the mainstream and while it still largely existed in the shadows.
It was also written around the time Sarah Everard was murdered by a Metropolitan Police officer , a tragedy that reignited the Reclaim These Streets movement demanding greater safety for women in Britain.
As the book goes to print in 2026, many of the issues explored in Wimmy Road Boyz — including Khan’s manosphere-leaning worldview, rising far-right sentiment , and the Reclaim These Streets protest that takes place on Wimmy Road — feel more relevant than ever.
“There is a part where they are talking and saying, ‘Man, the UK might become fascist soon,’ and at the time I was writing it, I didn’t even think that might actually happen,” Sufiyaan says. “The manosphere stuff is interesting because now it’s all out in the open, but back then it felt much more secretive, like there was this attempt to infect every man in the world with these toxic views.”
“I used to get Jordan Peterson videos recommended to me,” he adds, “and I’d always click ‘Do not recommend’, but they would still come back up. I wrote it without consciously thinking about the manosphere on a macro level. It was just something that felt real to people I’d known.”
Ultimately, Sufiyaan says he wanted to portray his characters with honesty rather than judgement.
“I’m interested in writing stories about men suppressing emotion, emotional vulnerability, revenge, and love,” he concludes. Wimmy Road Boyz is published by #Merky Books, a Penguin Books UK imprint launched by Stormzy, and will be released on 28 May 2026 Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press. Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA