A wedding, a poem, a shortcut home – what happens next will shake Thomas Odishu, wife Esther and children Ramina and George to the core. For this is Iraq in 1991 and there are no such things as coincidences. Informants are everywhere and once you’ve had a run-in with Saddam’s regime, your only chance of survival is escape. But no matter how hard you run, the past is always there, right behind you. Set in Iraq and England over three decades, Run Thomas Run is the gripping story of a father’s contorted love, a daughter’s coming of age, guilt, redemption and a child’s promise made forty years earlier that should never have been kept.

Bind: paperback