A Place for Us
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
** The New York Times bestseller **
'To be taken hostage by Fatima Mirza’s heartrending and timely story is a gutting pleasure... She captures your mind and heart with an urgency that defies you to stop reading. I guarantee you will be different when you close the book' Sarah Jessica Parker
'I loved this book' Anne Tyler
'The depth of the storytelling and the beauty of the language makes this debut something to treasure' John Boyne
An Indian–Muslim family is preparing for their eldest daughter's wedding. But as Hadia's marriage – one chosen of love, not tradition – gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds: can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away?
A Place for Us tells the story of one family and all family life: of coming to terms with the choices we make, of reconciingly past and present and of how the smallest decisions can lead to the deepest betrayals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bonds of faith and family strengthen and strangle in this promising but flawed debut, set in a close-knit Indian Muslim community in California. The story opens with the wedding of Hadia, golden child of Layla and Rafiq and older sister to Huda and Amar, skillfully setting up the central tension: why has Amar, the troubled youngest, been absent from the family, and can he be drawn back? The plot then shuffles backward and forward, revisiting plot points with few signposts to let the reader know when exactly key events an untimely death, the snuffing out of a forbidden relationship, a family-rupturing fight take place. Perspective alights on various characters, revealing more about some than others; middle child Huda remains nearly opaque, and early references to Rafiq's violent temper are all but dropped. For the final 80 pages, Rafiq narrates, and the story at last coheres. He delivers a heartrending reflection on his role in his son's partly self-imposed banishment: "It is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound." Mirza displays a particular talent for rendering her characters' innermost emotional lives, signaling a writer to watch.
