Wimmy Road Boyz author Sufiyaan Salam picks his 6 favourite road trip stories
The author shares his favourite road trip films and books to mark the release of Wimmy Road Boyz, his debut novel taking the literary world by storm.
I’m speaking to Sufiyaan Salam the day after Arsenal have won the Premier League. The night before, he’s been out near the Emirates stadium, where he saw “old people in wheelchairs, young people swigging beers and Jeremy Corbyn mingling with kids in pyjamas, whose parents had woken them up to celebrate.”
“Everyone was singing, I almost got hit by a firework, it looked like an early start to Eid celebrations” he laughs, describing a scene not unlike that in his debut novel, Wimmy Road Boyz. The story follows three brown boys cruising down Manchester’s curry mile in a white bimmer, in pursuit of a wild night out. But with the trio nursing heartbreak, secrets, grudges and a whole lot of feelings, there’s trouble ahead.
Born in Blackburn, the book was inspired by Salam’s own experiences on the curry mile, aka Wilmslow Road, where cars cruise up and down.
“I'd been going there my entire life. I went on this one night out, just me and two other brown guys. I was going through heartbreak, but I didn't know how to tell them. The next day, I thought ‘it'd be funny if those guys also had something that they were struggling with, the three of us having this fun night on the surface, but actually needing to talk to each other.”
Wimmy Road Boyz explores British Asian culture — which Salam quite rightly asserts is just British culture — masculinity and nuanced, honest characters as a counter to the trope of the good immigrant. It’s not your typical novel, either, reading like a cross between a book, a screenplay and a music video. As an animator who has worked on music videos for the likes of Grouplove, with a BAFTA-nominated short film, Magid / Zafar, that tracks.
All this from an author who can’t even drive – “not legally, at least.” In lieu of (legal) experience behind the wheel, these are the stories that inspired Salam’s genre-bending surefire bestseller.
1. Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Speaking to Salam from his position underneath a poster of the Jean-Luc Godard film A Woman Is A Woman, it’s perhaps no surprise that he chose Godard’s New Wave classic as his first road trip must-see. He watched it in the dingy basement of a bar in Manchester, where they were screening a season of films starring actress Anna Karina.
“Pierrot le Fou is typical ‘60s Godard. It’s basically a Bonnie and Clyde love story; two criminals want to get a better life for themselves, rob someone and run away in a cool car. Most of the film, they’re just bored and drifting. It’s almost like what would happen after Bonnie and Clyde if it didn’t end in tragedy?”
Salam appreciates the film which he says “is constantly ripping up the rules. The actors will be looking at the camera or coming out of frame. It doesn’t do anything that it's meant to do. I don't even understand the characters, they’re so selfish and we still just love them.”
2. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Salam calls this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “brutal” but also “McCarthy’s most optimistic novel, which maybe says more about how dark everything else he did was. Imagine Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, but it’s all horrible,” he laughs.
“It's post-apocalyptic, there's cannibals, but this father and son are on the road trying to survive. It's violent, but it's so beautifully written. The son is quite a tender kid, despite the horrors of the world. He doesn’t remember life before, whereas his dad still remembers the real world. We swing between horrible set pieces where people are being killed to moments of the dad comforting the son.”
Salam first came to The Road during the pandemic, when everyone was searching to understand the time we were living through.
“It was weirdly comforting, because it's way worse than what was actually going on. I was stuck in a flat in Manchester, but I wasn’t having to run away from cannibals. I read it in a feverish couple of nights – what else was there to do? The pandemicness of it really affected the reading experience.”
3. I'm Thinking Of Ending Things (2020)
Although I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is based on a 2016 novel, it’s the Netflix film adaptation that Salam chooses for his third road trip story.
“I didn’t love the book as much, but the film is interesting, innovative and divisive. You get double Jesse/ Jessie (Plemons and Buckley), who go on a road trip to see his parents at their remote farm. Half of the movie is them driving through a horrible blizzard, stuck in this car.”
Salam loves the surreal nature of the film, where the characters are more like ciphers.
“There are purposeful continuity errors the whole way through, lines misattributed and personalities changed. It has the feeling of a mental breakdown”
That abstractness was a big influence on Wimmy Road Boyz, where characters mask their true thoughts.
4. Catch Me Daddy (2014)
Salam’s next pick is an alternative road trip.
“It’s about this South Asian girl, Laila, who’s on the run from her dad. She's with her white boyfriend, who’s not great, driving away in a caravan through the Yorkshire moors. In a similar way to Pierrot le Fou, it’s Bonnie and Clyde, but stylistically it’s absolutely wild. It’s like an American Western set in Yorkshire, but it's also this dark, horrible Greek tragedy.”
Salam’s picks all veer away from the stereotypical American road trip movie, which are about “driving towards freedom. With Catch Me Daddy, I'm interested in these people driving towards destruction, being trapped in a car or trying to escape life, but destiny won't allow you to. Laila is someone who would never normally fit in this type of movie, so the movie has to bend out of shape as a result of her and her struggle.”
5. Sirāt (2025)
This Oscar-nominated Spanish film starts with a father looking for his lost daughter. What follows could have been quite cutesy, an older man connecting with ravers to learn the importance of community. But as Salam puts it, “this movie descends into hell. There’s Islamic allegories going on in the background,” with Sirat referring to a bridge in Islamic theology that souls cross on the Day of Judgement. But for Salam, this film is a warning against going into the desert. “There’s nothing good to be found there, Western man.”
“In the background, shit’s going down. There’s some kind of civil war or global conflict, and as much as the film has a new take on the ravers, where they're not just idiots, they're also very much these white hippies who are doing their thing whilst real-world conflict is going on. Every single person is punished horrifically. It feels like the desert itself is the main villain and the main hero as well.”
Watching the film at Curzon Bloomsbury was “a powerful experience,” according to Salam, “especially from a sound point of view. I was feeling all the music in a crazy way. When things are going wrong, they go wrong so loudly. I love when cinema is just a visceral experience.”
6. Withnail and I (1987)
For his final choice, Salam picks a flick he watched for the first time in lockdown.
“I watched Withnail and I with a bunch of friends in Manchester. I had a projector, but the sofa didn't face the wall, so I had a bean bag. I was 22 so I didn’t really have back problems then.”
The film in question follows Richard E Grant and Paul McGann as two out of work actors needing a holiday.
“They drive to the Lake District, but it descends into alcoholic darkness. It begins lightly, but then becomes a different thing. The genre of the film goes on a journey the same way the characters do, which is a fun way of storytelling.”
Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!
