Olive Juice by Sabir Ahmed

Genre: Literary thriller

Star Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

Introduction

What do you do when your whole life has been spent living for someone else, fighting for something else, and you lose it? That reason to keep going, that excuse to not quit. How do you live when you've lost your purpose?

Allie wakes up to realise her sister is missing. She was all the family she had left. She was the reason she'd risked so much. All those dirty deeds searching for a better life. What choice did she have left?

Jay was a soldier. The mission was his purpose. Until he chose to leave. A solider without an objective. He'd been raised with rage and trained to kill. How do you find a second life when your first was chasing death?

This was not meant to be a love story. They had their intentions and they were set on completing them. But how long can you deny it's a love story when the very things they're doing are for love?

When broken people collide, they either come together or fall apart. You can do your best to control the outcome, as you desperately cling onto the seams of your existence, but it is seldom your choice.

So what happens when the world is just as fractured as its inhabitants?

Two souls who'd lost their purpose, desperately clinging on to a life not worth living. They couldn't find one in themselves, maybe they'd have to find it in each other.

It takes set in a country that was divided by a civil war and follows two main characters: Allie, whose primary focus is finding her sister, and Jay, who’s just looking for a life post-army. It’s very much a story of watching two people learn about each other which helps them rationalise their own problems. There’s definitely a strong emphasis on their mental struggles and trying to deal with their pasts.

My Review

Olive Juice opens quietly, almost deceptively so. A man watches a cigarette burn. A woman sits nearby. Nothing explodes. Nothing announces itself as important. And yet, from that first scene, the novel makes its intentions clear. This is a story about what people carry with them, even when they are sitting still.

At its core, Olive Juice is a gritty, emotionally driven novel that blends violence, grief, tenderness, and reluctant connection. It is set in a harsh, lawless environment where danger feels routine and survival is never abstract. But the real terrain of the book is internal. It is about loss that has not settled, trauma that resurfaces without warning, and the strange ways people find each other in the middle of chaos.

The story follows Allie, a woman searching for her kidnapped sister, and Jay, a bar owner grieving the violent death of his closest friend. Their meeting is accidental, their alliance reluctant, and their bond forged not through romance or heroics but through shared damage. Neither of them is presented as pure or noble. They are exhausted, guarded, and often acting from instinct rather than principle. That is precisely what makes them believable.

What stands out most in Olive Juice is its attention to emotional aftermath. Violence is frequent and often brutal, but the narrative does not linger on spectacle for its own sake. Instead, it focuses on what happens afterward. The silence after a fight. The way a body remembers pain. The way the mind slips backward when triggered. One of the strongest sections of the book depicts Allie dissociating during an attack, mentally escaping into past trauma. This moment is handled with restraint and clarity, avoiding melodrama while still landing with force.

Jay’s grief is similarly understated. His sorrow shows up in avoidance, in irritability, in his reluctance to connect, rather than in long speeches. The book understands that grief often appears sideways. It leaks out in odd jokes, in anger at the wrong people, in the inability to sit still with another person’s pain.

What I Loved

The dialogue is sharp and often dry, occasionally darkly funny. There is a natural rhythm to conversations that makes them feel overheard rather than constructed. Characters speak the way people do when they are tired and defensive. Humor appears in unexpected places, not to soften the story, but to remind the reader that humor is often a survival mechanism.

What Could Be Stronger

Where the book could be stronger is in pacing and restraint. At times, the body count escalates so quickly that it risks dulling the emotional impact of individual moments. Some antagonists blur together, serving more as obstacles than as fully realized threats. A bit more variation in conflict, especially in the middle sections, would allow the quieter emotional beats to land more effectively.

Additionally, while Allie is a compelling and capable protagonist, there are moments where her near invincibility strains credibility. The novel is at its best when it allows her vulnerability to remain visible, when she is hurt, shaken, or uncertain. Leaning further into those moments would deepen her arc and raise the stakes beyond physical survival.

Final Thoughts

That said, Olive Juice succeeds because it is not trying to be tidy or comforting. It does not offer clean resolutions or moral certainty. It understands that trauma does not wrap itself up neatly, and that connection is often messy, tentative, and incomplete. The title itself reflects this. Olive juice is something people say instead of I love you when saying the real thing feels too exposed. The novel lives in that space, where affection is implied rather than declared.

Readers should buy this book if they are drawn to character driven stories with emotional weight, if they appreciate violence being treated as consequence rather than entertainment, and if they are interested in narratives about grief, survival, and uneasy companionship. This is not a light read, but it is a sincere one. It trusts the reader to sit with discomfort and rewards that trust with moments of genuine humanity.

Olive Juice is a novel that lingers not because of its action, but because of its silences. It is about what remains when the noise fades, and the bill finally comes due.

Olive Juice book review, Sabir Ahmed novel, literary fiction review, grief and trauma fiction, character driven novel, dark contemporary fiction, survival narrative