Student publishes powerful book exploring justice and silence

Second-year Law (LLB) student, Noor Ullah Khan, has published a debut short story collection, The Sickly Tree.

The book explores some of the most challenging issues facing communities where formal legal systems often fail to protect people.

Drawing on his upbringing in the Pashtun world in Pakistan, the stories examine honour killing, mob blasphemy violence, and the silence surrounding child abuse.

The book combines personal insight with themes closely linked to Noor’s studies at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. Noor says the world he grew up in inspired both his decision to study law and his desire to write the book.

"I have always been drawn to questions of justice, particularly in communities where formal legal systems fail to reach," he said. "People suffered without recourse, communities closed ranks, and the law, in its formal sense, was simply absent."

He explains: “I came to Cardiff because I wanted to understand those systems from the inside, to learn how law works, where it falls short, and how it might be made to work better for the people it most often fails. Cardiff's emphasis on law in the real world and its strong human rights profile made it exactly the right place for that.”

The book’s title reflects its central message. While a tree may look strong from the outside, its roots can be diseased. He says: “honour violence, mob justice, and the silence around child abuse are not isolated tragedies; they are symptoms of something deeper. The book asks what happens when we keep looking at the fruit and refuse to look at the roots.”

Outside of university, Noor volunteers with the Welsh Refugee Council, providing multilingual legal support to refugees and asylum seekers. He says this has “shown me the real human cost of the legal failures these stories explore. My studies at Cardiff have given me the frameworks to understand why those failures happen and what might be done about them.”

Through the book, he hopes to encourage difficult but necessary conversations among readers in both the UK and Pakistan.

"I want communities that bury these conversations to feel seen and challenged," he said. "And I hope that for anyone who has lived through something like what these stories describe, the book offers the feeling that someone finally said it out loud.

Beyond that, I hope the book opens doors to conversations, to events, to further writing. But more than anything, I want it to matter to the people who read it. That is the only measure of success that counts.”

The Sickly Tree is available now through Paperback and Kindle.