Tunis, 1605. An English pirate sails into the harbour and takes a new name, a new faith, a new life. The city keeps the rest.
Coming Soon · Historical Fiction
John Finch arrives in Tunis at twenty-nine, an English privateer with no war left to fight. He becomes Yusuf Reis, corsair captain under the Dey, and the harbour becomes his life: the raids, the prizes, the men who follow him and the man who wants him gone.
Watching all of it is Zahra, who works in silences and knows the price of every secret in the city. What grows between them is not simple. Nothing in Tunis is.
Told across forty years, from arrival to plague to the quiet of the mountains, Sparrow is a novel about what a man gives up to become someone else, and what remains when the sea is done with him.
Publication details to follow. Join the newsletter for the first word.
Khalifa grew up in Libya and Scotland during the 1970s and 1980s, shaped by punk music, friendship, fun and magic.
His first novel, The Psyke Green Machine, is out now. His second, Sparrow, is coming soon.
Out Now · Scottish Literary Fiction
Glasgow, 1984. A sixteen-year-old boy. A summer that changes everything. A voice you won't forget.