Iqbal Hussain on his debut children's novel
Caroline Carpenter is children's editor and deputy features editor at The Bookseller magazine, where she also writes the magazine’s monthly
...moreThe debut children’s author on channelling his Blackburn upbringing and Pakistani heritage in this new time-travelling tale.
Caroline Carpenter is children's editor and deputy features editor at The Bookseller magazine, where she also writes the magazine’s monthly
...moreIqbal Hussain was participating in a writers’ retreat led by Pushkin Children’s editor-at-large Sarah Odedina when the seed for his debut children’s novel The Night I Borrowed Time was planted. “One of the exercises was to write a short extract with two characters who are intergenerational, so I wrote something about a child and his gran. Sarah really liked the sound of that story and said: ‘There’s something in there. Have you thought about expanding it?’”
Recognising the potential, he began to work on a plot. “I thought: ‘If the gran comes from Pakistan, then we’ve got other cultural issues going on.’ Then I had to think about why she is coming over – maybe his parents have a bad marriage and the mum’s just finding it all too much, and she needs some help. So, it all came off the back of that very small exercise and then it built and built.”
The book was the subject of a four-way auction, which Hussain describes as “such a lovely shock”. He ended up signing with Natalie Doherty at PRH Children’s as “her vision really chimed with my vision”; the novel will launch the publisher’s new literary middle-grade imprint, Puffin Press.
“I cannot even tell you what a privilege it feels,” Hussain tells me. “I was a member of the Puffin Club magazine back in the day. And also, we grew up in a house where books were not common. My parents barely speak English or read English. We had very little money, so once I found second-hand books in charity shops, a whole new world opened up, and many of those books were Puffin books... To not only find that I’m going to be published by Puffin, but to be the lead title – on every level it’s just the most fantastic feeling.”
The Night I Borrowed Time tells the story of 11-year-old Zubair, the youngest of seven sons, who discovers he has inherited the power of time travel. Determined to help fix his parents’ crumbling marriage, he journeys to the past but soon realises that any changes he makes can have a huge effect on his future.
As children, you have such little agency in the world around you and I thought that with time travel, at least Zubair can feel that he can try to change things
Time travel aside, many elements of Zubair’s life are inspired by Hussain’s own upbringing, including his Pakistani heritage and having lots of older siblings. “I’m the youngest of six, so I always wanted Zubair to have that large family, because it’s something I understand.” Zubair’s brothers are sextuplets, who he refers to as “The Six”. They all have “distinct personalities”, and Hussain laughs: “I had such fun writing those brothers... There’s a lot of me and my real siblings in the book and there’s an awful lot of invention, so it’s a really nice mix.”
The time-travel aspect of the story came in at a “very early stage”. Hussain has “always been intrigued” by time-travel narratives: “As children, you have such little agency in the world around you and I thought that with time travel, at least Zubair can feel that he can try to change things.” Working out the mechanics of how it works was “so much fun” but also involved “so much hair-pulling”.
“You soon realise that you’ve got to have rules… and then each little ‘what if?’ question that pops up leads to three or four other little ‘what if?’ questions… That was not a straightforward process at all. It was a real learning curve, and it took several drafts of the book to get to where we are now.”
Zubair’s ability to time travel is heavily linked to his identity. “He is growing up in a very working-class, poor household up in Blackburn, so I had to find ways of doing things that meant something to him. In the end, I came up with the prayer mat that he uses and he has this magic amulet and then his eyes cross. All these three things have to come together in order for it to work.”
Another rule that Hussain decided on was that “ultimately, I’ve got to show that time travel comes at a price – yes, of course, it’s fun, but sometimes if you change something in the past, it’s going to affect something in the future, and not always in the way that you want it to”. Despite Zubair trying to fix his parents’ marriage, things are not that simple. “I thought: ‘We can’t end up with this happy-ever-after ending, because that’s not most children’s experience.’ I felt that the time travel had to give him hope, but ultimately he realises that some things aren’t meant to be.”
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Zubair’s time travelling is what Hussain deems “realistic” in that “he’s going into time periods in his family’s timeline”. One escapade takes him back to the Partition of India. Hussain was careful to write about this in a balanced way “to make sure that there were no obvious villains or heroes”, with a Partition expert also brought on board to fact-check. He expands: “It’s one of those awful periods of history that I think still isn’t being talked about enough at school. And I wanted something big that said something about my background that I hadn’t seen in any other time travel books.”
To bring Pakistan to life, he relied on Google and conversations with his mother and siblings to supplement his own memories of visiting the country as a child – “that heat that you just don’t get anywhere else and certain smells of orange trees, beautiful, spicy teas and burning fields.” He says: “I so rarely see Pakistan as a setting in a book, especially in children’s books, so it became really important to give Pakistan its moment in the sun. And, also, it was a way of rooting Zubair to his past.”
As well as being a journalist, Hussain published his debut adult novel Northern Boy (Unbound) last year. He says of moving into children’s writing: “Deep inside has always been that subconscious thought of wanting to write a children’s book, but never quite knowing how to do it or thinking I couldn’t do it.” Northern Boy’s central character is a 10-year-old boy – “almost a way of testing the water, I guess” – and, though he had to change his perspective to a child’s when writing The Night of Borrowed Time, the two titles share many similarities.
“That mix of humour and pathos, that dynamic of a large family is the same. I love writing about the working-class experience, because that’s my experience. Even things like the sentence structure is pretty much as I would write for an adult audience. Only occasionally did I simplify something, because I don’t think we should be patronising to children.”
Punjabi words are also woven into the text. Hussain explains that this was “so important” to him “because growing up, we spoke Punjabi and English and we would switch between languages all the time”. He adds: “I didn’t want a glossary at the end or the words to be italicised, because to [Zubair] they are normal, they’re not exotic.”
Puffin acquired two books from Hussain but he is still planning the second title “because there are so many books I want to write”. “But I suspect it’s going to have a very similar mix of humour and pathos,” he says. “And it’s definitely going to have a young boy character – no doubt helped by a very feisty young girl, as I have such strong female characters in my life – just because I think there’s a real dearth of boy books.
“It’s what I know, it’s what I was. I can think very clearly as a young boy of 10; for some reason, memories of that age range are really strong in my head.”
Metadata
Imprint Puffin
Publication 5th February 2026
Format PB (9780241742624, £8.99)
Rights sold Germany (Thienemann)
Editor Natalie Doherty
Agent Silvia Molteni and Lucy Irvine at PFD
