September 11 2011, another day that will live in infamy. Cataclysmic events invariably cause a deluge of fiction, some of it great. The Easter Rising, The Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, The Charge of the Light Brigade, the sinking of the Titanic, all have inspired tomes and novellas. And who could forget Lord Flashart’s contempt for the “endless poetry” of the First World War.
So it’s curious that comparatively few novels have been written about 9/11. The BBC has produced this graph to illustrate the disparity between fiction and non-fiction; just 164 novels on the subject:
Some of the books included do not exactly concern 9/11. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is more of a critique of the American response to al Qaeda’s atrocity, charting the slow radicalisation of the protagonist, Changez (the Urdu name for Genghis, which immediately evokes Genghis Khan).
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