"Like a sort of Notes from Underground for the hip-hop generation, Adnan Khan's darkly funny, compulsively readable, and deceptively moving first novel stares headlong into the struggles of its young characters and the harm they cause to others and themselves. In raw, streetwise vernacular, There Has to Be a Knife offers an acute study of toxic masculinity, of the ways in which unexpressed grief snarls through anomie into resentment and rage, and of the social scripts that exist for all of us - how we play our parts, and how we might also write our way into new stories." --Pasha Malla, author of Fugue States

"A searing meditation on isolation and grief in the modern world. There Has to Be A Knife is a striking debut." --Iain Reid, author of Foe and I'm Thinking of Ending Things