The Good Muslim
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
By the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
One hot afternoon in a remote Bangladeshi village, a telegram brings life-changing news to Maya Haque's door . . .
Eight years before, a brutal war tore Maya's country, and her family, apart. Now Maya realises it is time to return home at last. She arrives to find that everything has changed. Worst of all, her beloved brother, Sohail, has become a stranger to her, abandoning his liberal beliefs to become a strict religious leader.
As she attempts to get to grips with her brother's radicalism, Maya will be forced to rethink what it means to be a good daughter, sister, friend and a good Muslim.
Set in the dusty streets of Dhaka and the villages and river-islands of rural Bangladesh, at a time when the rise of religious fundamentalism was a whisper in the wind, The Good Muslim is an epic, unforgettable story of the challenges of peace in the long shadow of war.
'An unforgettable journey through a young nation trying to define itself.' Kamila Shamsie, author of Burnt Shadows
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Repercussions from the Bangladeshi war of independence ricochet through the Haque family in this gripping and beautifully written sophomore novel from Anam (A Golden Age). On his way back to Dhaka after the war in 1971, Sohail Haque stops at a barracks recently occupied by the retreating army, where he opens a door onto a horrible scene. When he arrives home transformed, his mother, Rehana, is alarmed by the change in her once carefree son and begins reading to him from the Koran. Maya, his sister, struggles to understand her brother's trauma, even as her work performing abortions for the Bangladeshi women who were raped by soldiers shows her another aspect of the war's aftermath. Sohail becomes an increasingly devout Muslim, while Maya starts a clinic in a distant village where, after delivering an imperfect baby, she is driven away. She returns to find that her brother's son, Zaid, is unkempt and poorly educated, old friends have grown affluent and complacent, and her mother has ovarian cancer. Maya begins writing increasingly inflammatory political articles and attempting to educate her nephew while her mother's health worsens and her brother withdraws further into his religion. From historical, political, and social tragedy, Anam has fashioned a mesmerizing story capturing a culture and a time, while showing that despite the worst, people go on to live their lives.
