Granta pre-empts Zaheer Allam’s VOLATILE CITY: A STORY OF SHOCKS AND SURVIVAL

Associate publishing director of Granta Books, Laura Barber, has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Zaheer Allam’s book about the fragility of the structures that underpin our daily lives, Volatile City: A Story of Shocks and Survival.

Zaheer is an urban strategist and researcher of smart, sustainable and future cities. His current roles include honorary consul of Jamaica in Mauritius, vice-chairperson of Landscope (Mauritius) Ltd and adjunct associate professor at the University of Queensland. Allam also collaborates with UN-Habitat, UNESCO, United Cities and Local Governments and the European Union on governance innovation, people-centred smart-city frameworks and future-oriented development strategy.

In Volatile City, Zaheer “reveals how the systems on which we all depend – energy, food, water, transport, finance, insurance, digital connectivity, governance itself – are now subject to disruptions (geopolitical, climatic, financial) that arrive too fast, overlap too frequently, and for which they were simply not designed.”

In an announcement in the Bookseller, Laura Barber said, “Zaheer’s book promises the kind of big picture, join-the-dots analysis I’ve been longing for and which the world urgently needs. It has been a long time since I’ve been so blown away by a writer’s breadth of thinking, and so compelled by his ability to make connections, to bring a story to life and to frame a clear argument.

While the subject matter is deeply alarming, Zaheer also points towards solutions and made me feel hopeful that it might just be possible to see the domino effect happening in reverse. The entire team at Granta immediately felt excited by the originality of Zaheer Allam’s thinking and by the potential of this book, which will be a superlead title for our 2028 list.”