‘Fundamentally’ has been given some extremely positive pre-publication reviews. I looked forward to learning plenty about deradicalisation programmes from an author whose Author’s Note explains how she worked in Iraq for a decade advising the Iraqi government on the rehabilitation of women connected with ISIS before turning to writing fiction.

Nadia, the central character, is an academic based in London who, after being brutally rejected by her girlfriend, decides to take up an opportunity to set up a rehabilitation programme for ISIS women in Iraq. Early on in the novel, she meets Sara, a girl from East London who runs away from a restrictive home life to join ISIS at the age of fifteen. Something about her endears her to Nadia who recognises that she could have been that girl. She is determined to help Sara return home.

This novel has a really interesting premise. The narrative encourages us to consider the incredibly difficult position that girls like Sara find themselves in as a result of impulsive decisions, the reasons why they imagine that life in Iraq will be a better alternative to that in the UK, and the assumptions that are made on their behalf.

Despite Nadia’s determination to make a success of the programme, we see how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy turn, the in-house bickering and power plays. Younis’ satire of UN politics amuses and depresses equally. However, overall, the humour is a little too obvious to be ‘hilarious’ (as billed) and some of the characters teeter on the verge of stereotypes.

Fluently written but ‘Fundamentally’ didn’t hook me in the ways that I had imagined it might.

My thanks to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I can see this one making a huge splash next year - in fact, it already seems to be! Fundamentally unfolds at breakneck speed, brimming with razor sharp humour, poking into taboo subjects most people would rather turn a blind eye too. If you read and loved Guest House for Young Widows and wished there could be a hilarious fictionalised version featuring a young woman who made one terrible mistake as a teenager and a queer lecturer in way over her head, get yourself a copy of Fundamentally.

Its pace is the weak point for me. I know it's not supposed to be a factually accurate depiction of a UN initiative to rehabilitate ISIS brides, but it feels like the author just skipped over the parts that felt too tricky or lengthy to include. Nadia, the lecturer who suddenly finds herself running the rehabiliation programme for ISIS brides in Iraq, arrives at base, then suddenly it's one month later - what have they achieved? There are regular time jumps like this which pulled me out of the story and made it seem flatter than I'd like.

But overall it is a singular book which pushes a lot of buttons, forces the reader to confront young women on the margins whose teenage decisions dictate their entire lives for the worse, and root for those who have no fucking clue what they're doing, but dammit they're trying to make a difference.

I requested this on the strength of all the positive reviews but was then disappointed when reading. The idea is a good one and I think a lot of people will love it but I'm not sure about the execution. It felt a little cringe at times and unrealistic, wrapping up a bit too easily.

I absolutely flew through this book!

We meet Nadia as she is going through a heartbreak and needs to escape London. So she does what we would all do in her position and decides to accept a job offer from the UN to set up a deradicalisation programme for ISIS brides in Baghdad. However she is quickly disillusioned and out of her depth and things quickly start to unravel.

This is a powerful and moving story yet also hilarious all the way through. You can tell that Younis has real world experience in this complex arena, I’m fascinated by the inner workings of the UN and I thought this was a hilarious insight into it.

If you are after a unique and thought provoking read, this is for you!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc.

Fundamentally is a darkly funny and thought-provoking novel about Nadia, a heartbroken academic who takes on a UN job in Iraq to help rehabilitate ISIS brides. There, she meets Sara, a fiery young Londoner whose story challenges everything Nadia believes.

A unique and engaging debut read!

This is probably the most different book I’ve read in a while.

Nadia is an academic who’s sent to Iraq to rehabilitate Isis brides whilst escaping a failed relationship from her girlfriend and her mother.

She meets Sara a wise cracking Londoner who says she go t mixed up in the wrong crowd when she followed a friend over but Nadia believes her and so puts all her efforts into rescuing Sara as she feels that they are very alike.

But when things go terribly wrong, Nadia must decide if she just got played or if Sara is the real deal.

Nadia is hilarious and a mess, but as we get to know her we realise she has a strained relationship with her mother and family after the death of her father.

As an only child, her mother pours everything into her and when Nadia fails to live up to her high expectations she kicks her out.

I feel like the relationship between mother and daughter was really well written and the scenes with Sara made me cringe a lot.

At times it did feel like the story was dragging and could have been finished sooner but overall this is an interesting book.

At times very funny and also very crude but overall quite a depressing read. The infighting of the UN agencies, the corruption of the authorities and the sheer inability to achieve very much seems all too plausible and considering the author's background seems highly likely to be accurate. Nadia comes across as incompetent and not at all the strong woman you'd like her to be but the personalities of her colleagues and the women in the camp are portrayed really well and show that the author has a real talent for writing. I can't say I enjoyed the book but I can appreciate that it's well-written and flows along at a good pace.

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (UK release Feb 2025) is a darkly comic, boldly subversive, tale, which delivers something unique and significant.

Nadia, a British woman of Pakistani descent has distanced herself from her Islamic roots. Recently recruited by the United Nations to “deradicalise” European women who joined ISIS through marriage, Nadia is thrust into a job both urgent and morally ambiguous.

Nadia seizes this UN mission as a chance to escape her personal crises and seek meaning. She arrives in Baghdad, full of self-assurance and idealistic plans, only to be immediately humbled by the chaotic black farce of the compound—plagued by bureaucracy, cynicism, and stagnation.

Don’t come to Fundamentally expecting a journalistic study of human trafficking or the political intricacies of the Middle East. These themes, as important as they are, are handled here swiftly and surely to propel the story and bring context to the question of what it truly means to belong.

At the camp Nadia meets a young ISIS bride from London, Sara (a remarkable character) and - seeing something of herself in the girl Sara once was - determines to help her at any cost. As the relationship between them deepens, Nadia finds herself engaged on a far more challenging personal journey than she ever anticipated.

Nadia is a mess, as appealing as she is infuriating. For all her claims to want to help others, she’s entirely concerned with her own appetites and unable to connect with anyone on an authentic, personal, level. Blinkered by her self-righteousness, her shortcomings are as invisible to her as they are evident to us, and her realisations are a long time coming.

Framed in a comic novel Younis does an excellent job of sketching a clear sense of these women, the horrors of their situation, and the dissatisfactions which led them to this.

A more measured pace and some additional depth to the storytelling would have suited better my own taste, but would have impeded the punchy, energetic book the author clearly intended.

I found Fundamentally to be a surprising, funny, and moving pleasure.

Following her first sapphic heartbreak, long-suffering academic Nadia decides to flee London and take a job opportunity with the UN to lead a deradicalisation program for ISIS brides. After arriving in Iraq, she finds herself drawn to one of the younger refugees, Sara, and becomes increasingly desperate to help her return home, despite the fact that her hypocritical colleagues, and Sara herself, might have other plans.

This was such a funny, thought-provoking, well-written book. Nadia was such an interesting and complex main character. Her inner monologue was so engaging to read as she grappled with her moral compass, her relationships with her ex and her mum, and the life she could have lived if things had gone differently. The references to the UK and British culture made me laugh a lot but also were a harsh reminder that the struggles depicted in this book exist in the same world as things like Milton Keynes, Tory MPs, and Strictly Come Dancing. I think this book did such a good job of balancing wit and humour with nuanced observations about motherhood, religion, and sexuality, meaning it could convey its ideas without feeling too heavy or condescending.

All the characters in this were so well fleshed out and none of the side characters felt underdeveloped which is such a hard thing to get right. The writing overall was great and I read this almost in one sitting because of how compelling, funny, and well-paced it was.

I think this is probably one of my favourite books of the year and definitely one I'll be thinking about for a while.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with an eARC of this book in return for an honest review.

Requested on the strength of the positive quotes promising a hilarious novel. DNF’d at 15%, not quite living up to the hype for me.

This a really original novel that is a breath is fresh air, it's so different from anything I have read in quite some time.
The author has written a book that really should not make you laugh but I could not stop laughing, put aside the religious element and you have a really warm, engaging, funny book about young woman that gives an alternative insight into and perspective of a world that's only usually seen on loaded news reports. The characters bring a nuance to the full premise both the lead and secondary are well written with strong voices all of which are original bringing the book to life but I think this novel is most successful in its satire of the UN and the British press. Great piece on the state of the modern world.
An engaging, compassionate, pacey well written very good debut novel.

A thought-provoking book with an interesting premise. Truthfully I wasn’t sure what to expect - reviews saying it’s hilarious, while tackling the subject of ISIS wives. Personally I didn’t find it as humorous as I anticipated, perhaps I didn’t gel with the character of Nadia. Enjoyable but not one I’d thrust into the hands of friends.

The premise of Fundamentally is so promising I can't help being disappointed. The voice of the narrator, Nadia is quite engaging. However, I found the characters two-dimensional and the story wrapped up too neatly.

An absurdly funny book that is a scathing satire on the UN and its complete ineptitude, the author has written a book that really should not make you laugh but I could not stop laughing, put aside the religious element and enjoy a very good book

Loved this so much. Very very funny - and uses humour to challenge all kinds of pre-conceptions and taboos, while handling some really sensitive subjects deftly.

I can see that this book is going to be a great success, but it just wasn’t for me.
I got a third of the way in and just didn’t feel compelled enough to go back to it and so I lost the thread of characters and what was happening. Right book, wrong time I think.

It is definiteLy original. And that had really appealed to me. The premise of a Darkly comic look at trying to rehabilitate or deradicalise young British ISIS brides. Something in it just didn’t quite click for me, it o know it will have its audience and I wish the author and publishers well.

I waited a few weeks to write this review so that it would consist of more than just variations of 'lol', given that this is genuinely one of the funniest books I've ever read. Nadia's narrative voice is absolutely hilarious, wry and witty and a complete disaster in ways that felt just close enough to real to anchor the book's ambitious premise. The secondary characters are vivid and alive, too - a particular special mention goes to an overly enthusiastic white feminist at the UN - and, for the most part, the narrative pushes itself along in a pacey fashion.

I don't personally know enough about Islam to comment on its rep here, but I did appreciate the nuance that Younis brings to it; we see the ways that Nadia's own life has been shaped by her mother's religious devotion, and we see the ways that the West often patronises people in majority Muslim countries by framing Islam as some kind of backwards, second rate religion, and how radicalisation can't be divested from the way that Islam has been stigmatised across the global North.

I think this novel is most successful in its satire of the UN, a huge, umbrella organisation which is always trying to spend and thus justify its budget, and ends up throwing huge parties for its delegates and paying bribes. The juxtaposition of the earnestness of its newer employees and the jaded resignation of corruption of its more seasoned workers is clear here, and we see it through Nadia's own journey, as she moves from lionising the UN and her job to realising the sheer mundanity of the bureaucratic loopholes she's forced to jump through. My only experience with the UN is once getting lost in their Swiss headquarters whilst trying to find a loo, but still, I thought that the white saviour aspect was tackled well here.

The only part that didn't work for me was the ending, which I thought was too neat and a little oddly paced - a lot happens in one chapter, then nothing for another two or three, and then it's all tied up rather suddenly. It felt unrealistic to me that the issue of radicalisation in one woman would be sorted so suddenly. I was so invested in the rest of the book that I think I wanted a bit more out of the ending.

Still, an absolute roaring hoot of a book. I don't think anyone else could have written this. Nussaibah Younis' very particular background (she's worked in deradicalisation in Iraq) could have written this without falling into the myriad obvious pitfalls. It's a tough sell to write a funny novel about ISIS brides, but against all odds, here it is, and it works.

Scathing, singular, hilarious - I've never read anything quite like Fundamentally and I'm not sure I ever will. An excellent read that entertains AND makes you think.

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book. However I won’t be posting a full review as it wasn’t the one for me.

I think this is going to be very popular for a lot of people but if I’m honest I didn’t expect quite so much humour/lightheartedness. The only thing I didn’t like was how the mc seemed to be making what I thought was excessive commentary on aspects of people’s bodies/physiques. It’s nothing against the book, just my personal preference is to something a bit grittier and dark and whilst I know this is clearly advertised as having that bit of humour, I thought the backstory and context would balance that out for me, but it wasn’t to be.

I really think this is going to be a popular read and I’m so sorry it wasn’t the one for me on this occasion. Thank you so much again.

This is a razor sharp debut novel with a protagonist whose voice is unique and propulsive and a well drawn cast of characters. It has the rare gift of being a book that's both hilariously funny and utterly compelling. The observations are spot on. I loved this alternative insight into and perspective of a world that's only usually seen on loaded news reports.
I was completely absorbed and read this in a day. This is a singular book and is already one of my top books of 2025. Fantastic and refreshing.