Pure

Timothy Mo doesn't hang about. His new novel – his first for more than a decade – dumps the reader straight into the world of Snooky, a Muslim born in "198-" and named Ahmed, now a Thai ladyboy and award-winning film critic for the Siam New Sentinel, who refers to herself in the third person, a habit that she brought to English from Siamese. It's one of the novel's innumerable instances of east-west imbrication and exchange. In Mo's analysis, there's no such thing as racial or ideological purity. As Snooky points out, even the western is pretty eastern.