A powerful contemporary British literary novel about asylum, disability, welfare, policy, housing, protest, public systems and the quiet violence of official language.

On paper, there was a process.

Yasmin Hussain knows that an asylum file does not move like a path. A missed call can become a note. A mistranslated date can stain years. A family waiting for reunion can be held inside a sentence no one intended to wound.

Inside government, Adaeze Okeke learns how a cleaner line can move human facts into the background. Bex Whitaker turns pain, disability and fear into records because systems demand proof before they recognise cost. Joan Ackroyd watches the river and knows that belonging is work, not sentiment. Around them move lawyers, ministers, carers, officials, residents, activists, claimants and families trying to survive the language used to manage them.

Across forty-four linked lives, Parallel Hostilities traces the pressures of a country in which systems run beside each other: immigration files, welfare assessments, ministerial submissions, flood warnings, housing decisions, protest briefings, hospital corridors, advice offices and council records.

Written with restraint, compassion and moral force, this is a searching literary novel about bureaucracy, state power, private conscience and the ordinary people caught inside public decisions. It asks what happens when institutions speak in process, risk, eligibility and control, while human beings continue to live in fear, hope, pain, duty and love.

For listeners of serious contemporary fiction, British social realism, political literary fiction, social justice fiction, disability fiction and novels about migration, welfare and institutional failure, Parallel Hostilities is a deeply humane portrait of lives placed under pressure by systems that claim to protect them.

A novel about files, borders, bodies, rivers, policy, protest and the human cost of what is written down.