I listened to Those People Next Door by Kia Abdullah in September, having really enjoyed her previous novels (see my blogs on Next of Kin and Take it Back).

Salma, Bilal and their son Zain have just moved into a new house on a ‘Brookside Close’ type neat estate in Ilford. It was not their heartfelt choice, but they move despite their reservations, looking for a place Zain can grow up without being led astray. Their neighbours Tom and Willa seem friendly on first meeting but soon things begin to spiral out of control, when Tom rips Zain’s Black Lives Matter banner out of the front garden.

This sets off a chain of events that includes Salma and Bil’s window being vandalised, their car being scratched and then their delightful dog Molly going missing. Getting a dog involved is the perfect way to raise the stakes and the writing was so good that I literally had to stop listening at one point I found it so distressing, to go online to check whether the dog was going to be OK or not before continuing.

As these events roll out, Zain’s friendship with Tom and Willa’s son Jamie is kept under the radar, as they try to keep out of their parents way, developing an app for deaf children, building on Jamie’s experience of being partially deaf and Zain’s IT skills.

As with all of Abdullah’s novels, this is perfectly paced and plotted, ratcheting up the tension and stress as each page is turned and having incredibly clever characterisation. This time however, prejudice, assumptions, bias, racism, anger and spite are all laid bare and you cannot read it without having a long hard thing about racism in the UK today. And none of the adults come out of this blameless or even well. A great read.