the god thing

Al-lah! After 17 years on the street, reborn, is what former crackhead Omar feels.

His landline, like a birth cord, reconnects him to his Eritrean mother Aatifa.

As Omar celebrates being one year clean at the Whitechapel Day Centre, his Parisian painter girlfriend Nouche is coming to terms with her celebrity divorce. What happened to the studios, the cameras, the City of Lights?

Enter Shoreditch rising star, artist Billie Jean.

At the Whitechapel Centre, Omar's peer Terry has relapsed and is in Intensive Care. Anwar, mute in group therapy now for a year, explodes on stage in a rap which has got the Centre over a million views on YouTube. 'No roof on no head in Lahore.'

Set in the shadows of the 2012 Olympics, the god thing trails the bonds of London's real East Enders: mothers, sisters, sons. Lovers.

Omar, Nouche and Billie Jean keep track of one another. What does each of them know about the others?

And who is tracking them?

Meanwhile, Omar's youngest sibling Abebech, about to give birth herself, has started wearing a veil. Aatifa, his mother, guards over what is left of her children, while keeping silent on the past. How did 'home' become so distant, Omar wonders, so complicated, so forked? He grew up in a Hampstead diplomatic residence. What happened in the seventeen years he was out on the streets on crack? How did his mother end up in a Tower Hamlets council kitchen?

And what did the woman in the Apple Store mean, about her 'plans' for Omar's sister?

Spending cuts, silence and rage, in the god thing. It's fiction, but not as we know it.


Series 4. Happening as we speak.


Serial fiction is back! Popularised once by Dickens, it is now happening online. Online serial the god thing kicks off a fresh series.
Join us live at the Vintage Emporium, London, April 16, 7:30 pmhttp://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=202164493148898

Then go catch up online! http://thegodthing.tumblr.com

More info in our facebookgroup: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=124131374307285

the god thing. fiction, but not as we know it


the god thing is nada holland (text), petra droogsma (video, photo's), ruth clarke (text-edits, production), bubbly choudhury (contacts)