Is it safe blud? Is it safe?

So, (yet another) novel that everybody's been talking about (see previous articles on STML, and at the Guardian), Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, finally lands on STML's doorstep - well, the first third anyway, in a kind of advanced taster deal.

If you remember, the book was the big event at last year's Frankfurt book fair where it was the subject of a fierce bidding war, clinched by a six-figure sum from Fourth Estate's Nicholas Pearson. Malkani himself - a Cambridge Graduate and editor of the FT's Creative Business supplement - has not as yet appeared much in public, but with the amount of promotion waiting to swing into action ahead of publication in May, the post of celebrity author, desired or not, is beckoning. All of which is meaningless of course, unless the book lives up to the hype.

Luckily, the first part of the book, at least, certainly does. Narrated in the kinetic and authentic voice of Jas, the least secure member of a desi gang, the novel takes us inside the souped up Beemers of Hounslow's mobile phone-boosting asian kids and the internecine battles between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. The joke is that the Beemers and the phones all belong to their mums, they can't help but fancy Muslim girls, and life is a constant negotiation between the local racial and criminal faultlines and "complicated family-related shit", which often necessitates a break from rumbling to pick up Aunty-ji's prescription from Boots. Nevertheless, the mobile jacking operation is clearly headed into riskier territory, and only the intervention of an old teacher saves the lads from yet more police attention. As the first part comes to a close, the exasperated teacher, desperate to understand their withdrawal from the multicultural society that is supposed to be built in their image, makes a deal to win them back - promising, among other things, to introduce them to a fellow Indian who has made it big in the City. Here the taster ends, but it will be interesting to see if Malkani can convincingly pull off the clichéd figure of the well-meaning white teacher while maintaining the (frequently hilarious) bad-lads appeal of his characters.

Londonstani is one of several fascinating second-generation novels appearing this year - ones set in a noticeably different milieu to their predecessor Zadies and Monicas. In April, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism hails from - but quickly exits - Southall, the rival desi neighbourhood to the north of Hounslow, and is described by the publisher as "a filthy, unflinching and politically incorrect take on modern Britain", with a be-titted cover to match. The rather more serious Just Like Tomorrow by Faiza Guene arrives from Paris, and answers a question posed by STML back in November as to the possibility of translating novels, like Malkani's, written in the deep, rich slang of the immigrant culture where the indigenous spoken language meshes with one or more imported tongues, as well as layers of US influences and text-speak. Just Like Tomorrow, wildly successful in France last year under the title Kiffe-Kiffe Demain, was written in Verlan.

Verlan is the language of the French banlieus, the high-rise, largely Arab estates where Just Like Tomorrow is set. Its origin is in the linguistic wordplay of Arabic, fitted to local French slang, whereby words are reversed - voiture flipped and shortened to tourv, the classic flic for cop turned to keulf. Its origins as both an expression of identity within an immigrant community and as a code for disguising communication from institutions of social control make Verlan a powerful narrative tool.

It should also make translation damn hard, and the English translator of Just Like Tomorrow, Sarah Adams, recently told Radio 3's The Verb how she looked to the local slang of Brixton, where she lives, for inspiration - emphasising that while she has tried not to simply swap one immigrant culture for another, she looked for an authentic "urban street language in a developed western country. You want something that sounds authentic and not translated." Her efforts will be going up against our home-grown urban slang in June.