Who knew Issa Shamsuddin? Is his disappearance a matter of choice - the next step in a journey of self-imposed exile? Or are there more sinister forces at play?

Set in the Western Cape in the years leading up to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 and in the temporary bedsits and hookah cafes of post-September 11 London, Ishtiyaq Shukri's firts novel poses questions about what happens to belief when personal ideals are betrayed by world events. A daring debut in both form and content, and a story that will leave you breathless, lingering long aster you have turned the final pages.

Issas friend Katinka, his brother Kagiso, mother Dr Vasinthe Kumar and London neighbour Frances reconstruct their memories of the missing man, looking for clues in the past that might explain the riddle of the present. Could the answer about Issas whereabouts lie in events that took place in the western Cape before South Africas democratic elections? Issas refrain, after all, was: The past is always with us.

Kagiso and Vasinthe know Issa grew up with an absent Muslim father. He was parented by his Hindu mother Vasinthe and Kagisos mother Gloria, who worked in Vasinthes employ in apartheid South Africa.

Kagiso recalls how Issa, as a matriculant, infuriated education authorities with his theories about Baden Powells role in the siege of Makifeng. Issa was clever at school, a political thinker who would become an anti-apartheid activist. Dreamer, schemer, historys cleaner the other boys teased him.

Frances, Issas elderly neighbour, recollects a young man who led a simple, frugal life. She has spent such a long part of her life being dazzled by peacocks, she says, that she found him to be one of Gods abstemious creatures. He worked hard at his computer, ate little, partied not at all, ran errands for her, watched TV with her and washed several times a day.

Katinka shares her memories of an Issa absorbed in scholarly work, reading and writing. But she does not share her secret memory of Karim. Issa would not touch contaminated surfaces of handrails and doorknobs with bare hands whereas her relationship with Karim, her secret, is more tactile. Kagiso has schoolboy memories of Issa saying he liked deserts because they were clean.

Vasinthe, the analytical mother, knows the clean deserts her son loved were inspired by TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), that being clean has both political and religious connotations. Might Issa have become religious, she wonders.

But what does religious mean? For Frances, one religion remembers things another doesnt whereas Issa was able to unite Christianity with Islam for her mind. She prays with both her rosary and the tasbeeh he gave her, calling both a trosebery. She knows from Issa that Chaucers wife of Bath was an Arab woman, that Christs grandfather on earth was Imran.

What emerges, as these fragments surface, is of a man insisting on a common humanity, finding ways to link belief systems and ideologies even as he witnesses a world being divided into two.

Issas sense of unity appears to pull together the African and the Arab world, the homeless, refugees, the disappeared, street people, the invisibles, Europes untouchables, the hideous, the elderly who must endure, in Shukris words, Portable altars, portable surgeries, portable meals. Come and go. Come and sorry, cant stop, go.

Issa, as reconstructed by those he loved, has linked the tools of terror being used against his united world with concepts he remembers from apartheid South Africa. These include methods of controlling economies through Vietnam-style invasions, halting peoples movements through arrest, deportation and disappearance, breaking down peoples will through the use of jails, torture, and concentration camps. For Issa riot gear, battering rams and careless welfare are