Both my first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and my latest one, The Last Illusion, are 9/11 novels. I have never minded that classification, as the attacks were a central event in both of them, just as they were in my life. Another reason is that I feel they are in good company. Critics have been quick to dismiss the 9/11 literature that has emerged, but there are several truly great books that have tackled this fairly impossible subject, and dozens more pretty good ones. These are my recommendations, published between 2003 and 2011.

Hamid is one of my favourite writers and this book is pretty mind-blowing. For one thing, its narrative structure is fascinating: the whole thing is a dramatic monologue. We’re in a cafe in Lahore and a Pakistani is telling his life story to an American. The Pakistani happens to be a former American – a successful Princeton graduate, who at one time had a great job and an American girlfriend. After 9/11, he retreats from it all, but the real question is: how much of a choice did he have?

Messud has been a great supporter of my work, so it may look biased to choose this; but many agree The Emperor’s Children is the best 9/11 novel. Messud captures the struggles of a still-very-much-alive Manhattan privileged intellectual class through the portrait of three friends, just as well as she evokes those months leading up to the attacks.

This is one of my favourite 9/11 works. To attempt a dark comedy about 9/11 is already something, but to make it this funny and crazy is something else – and something only a writer as good as Kalfus can do. He dares to ask: what if you actually were, for a moment, relieved to hear your spouse was in the towers? What if their survival was a disappointment? This portrait of a completely broken couple at a time when the world is also completely broken is unforgettable.

The Zero by Jess Walter

Another very original dark comedy about 9/11, Walter’s Kafka-esque political thriller has an outrageous premise: he takes an NYPD cop who has shot himself in the head and suffers from terrible memory gaps and assigns him the task of giving Ground Zero tours to celebrities …



DeLillo is one of my favorite authors, period, so it’s hard for me not to love everything he writes. This not my favourite DeLillo, but I still liked it. I love the simple premise of a lawyer who worked in the World Trade Centre surviving the attack and yet not quite surviving his life in the aftermath, intertwined with the narrative of a “falling man” performance artist.



This British-Pakistani novelist was big on the US slam poetry circuit for a while – and this is evident in his slang-studded, electric prose. This debut novel is a mix of the classic and the original: half immigrant fiction, half coming-of-age NYC novel. The three young guys of Pakistani origin on whom the book focuses give Naqvi a way to explore the post-9/11 Muslim experience, but they also offer insights as to what it means to be American – now or at any time.

I met Amy Waldman at a writing residency just a year after this came out and we became friends. We share a journalism background but Amy was a hard-hitting news reporter at the New York Times, and this is very much the work of someone with that experience. Waldman puts forth a premise with unlimited consequences: what if an American Muslim were blindly selected to design the Ground Zero memorial? She examines the idea from every angle. The book is meticulously put together.

I may be alone in considering this collection Wallace’s greatest work. It is dark, relentless, difficult, painful and breathtaking. Some of the stories were published before 9/11, but several seem to me the work of a post-9/11 Wallace, more disillusioned with American life than ever. Most memorable is The Suffering Channel, a 90-page novella set in the months before the attack, about a magazine with headquarters in the World Trade Center. It’s tinted with the dark gloss of the inevitable, but not entirely in ways you’d expect.

This is one of the wildest and weirdest of the group. I loved the unrelenting inventiveness and audacity of this absurdist experimental novel. Two sisters are travelling through Morocco when their plane is hijacked. The way Julavits handles their thoughts, the logistics of the plane, the conversations, the past and the future is incredible.

Three of the stories in this collection (a third of them) involve 9/11. The book is dark, haunted, deeply sad, relentlessly moving. In typical Adrian fashion, ethics and morality are intensely contemplated through a dynamic cast of characters, both celestial and terrestrial.

• Porochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion is published by Bloomsbury.