At what point do troubled teenagers abandon everything they know to become jihadis? Fatima Bhutto's seductive novel "The Runaways" offers a thrilling answer.

Anita Rose excels academically at her school in Karachi, Pakistan, but her family is so poor that she must ask an elderly neighbor, Osama Shah, for gas so they can cook. Osama soon becomes the friend and mentor Anita has always longed for. "This city, Anita, it will take your heart if you let it," he warns her. "It will eat you alive." Their tender relationship, however, fails to insulate her from her wealthy classmates' incessant abuse or console her deep-seated frustrations about her station in life.

Elsewhere in Karachi, Monty lives like a king. Though his family owns half of the city, as well as a second home in London, he is bored and restless until he falls head over heels for the mysterious, confident and sometimes irascible Layla. "It cost Layla so little to make Monty happy." But Layla opens Monty's eyes to many uncomfortable truths, such as the cruelty and hypocrisy of his parents, and this causes him to question the values they raised him with.

Meanwhile, Sunny in Portsmouth, England, is bitter and depressed. With each passing day, he feels more disconnected from his well-meaning widowed father, who has high expectations for his university-bound son, and more confused by his attraction to men. When Sunny's tattooed older cousin Oz convinces him that there's a better, more righteous path, with Islam at the center, Sunny is hooked. "For the first time in his life he felt that sanctuary expanding, opening up into the light."

Bhutto elegantly weaves the three young lives together in a tight braid. Though they hail from different communities, Anita, Monty and Sunny share vulnerabilities and a thirst for intellectualism. On their respective journeys to be heard and loved, they stumble into radicalism. Their detours are not born of mere teenage rebellion but of a primal desire for absolution and a conscious effort to reconcile how they see themselves and how they wish the world to see them. What they fail to understand is the high price they may pay for it.

Like R.O. Kwon's 2018 novel, "The Incendiaries," Bhutto's "The Runaways" is a meticulous psychological study of who turns to radicalism and why. It is also a provocative investigation of courage, and how it can foment either salvation or damnation (though one can't know which until it's too late). "It's a strange thing, bravery," muses Monty. "So long as he follows his thoughts, observing them as they come to him, Monty finds he can turn them any way he wants … Anything is possible now."

The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto

Anjali Enjeti's reviews have appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Washington Post and elsewhere. She's a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

The Runaways
By: Fatima Bhutto.
Publisher: Verso, 432 pages, $19.95.