Saad Hossein Books in Order

If you want the Bangladesh based shared-world books: Djinn City → Cyber Mage
If you want the quickest way in: The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
If you want more of that world after Gurkha: The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday → Kundo Wakes Up
If you want his war satire first: Escape from Baghdad! / Baghdad Immortals

Saad Hossein is a Bangladeshi writer of fantasy, science fiction, and black comedy, published internationally as Saad Z. Hossain. He was born and raised in Dhaka and still lives and works there, and that city keeps showing up in his fiction.

He studied English literature and commerce at the University of Virginia. Before the novels, he built his writing life through articles, reviews, and short fiction in Bangladeshi newspapers and magazines, and he has often described writing as a craft that gets stronger with practice.

That steady practice shows.

His debut first appeared in Bangladesh as Baghdad Immortals, then reached a wider international audience in revised form as Escape from Baghdad!. Set in Iraq after the US invasion, it is a war satire, a chase novel, and a story about ordinary people trying to stay alive while larger powers wreck everything around them. Even in this first book, you can see the pattern of his work, morally messy characters, dark humor, and a sharp eye for what systems of power do to everyday life.

With Djinn City, he shifted the stage back to Bangladesh and opened up the shared universe many readers now know him for. The novel starts in Dhaka with a damaged family, a child named Indelbed, and a father whose collapse exposes old ties to the djinn world. Cyber Mage pushes that same universe forward into a climate changed future, where hackers, biotech, and old supernatural forces are all part of the same busy, unstable city.

He likes to put myth and machinery in the same room.

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday and Kundo Wakes Up carry those ideas into AI governed cities, failing coastlines, and stories that can be very funny one moment and surprisingly tender the next. Readers often come to Hossain for the pace and the wild concepts, but they usually stay for the people underneath the spectacle, exiles, hustlers, damaged idealists, and survivors who keep moving even when the world around them has become absurd.

Shorter fiction has been part of his career too. His work has appeared in anthologies such as The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4 and The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. That fits him. He is drawn to inherited stories, especially djinn lore, but he does not treat myth like a museum object. In his books it is alive, political, argumentative, and mixed up with class, technology, religion, and climate.

He has said that character comes first, and that feels true when you read him. The settings can get enormous and the ideas can get wonderfully strange, but the books stay grounded because the people in them want concrete things, to survive, to get paid, to get home, to find someone, to settle a score, or simply to make sense of a world that keeps changing under their feet.

He remains based in Dhaka. From there he keeps writing speculative fiction that feels rooted in South Asian places and histories while staying open, fast, and welcoming to readers who may be stepping into his work for the first time.