Tell Her Everything
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A CrimeReads Best of 2023 Notable Selections
A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Thriller of 2023
“[A] a powerful tale of guilt and betrayal…Tell Her Everything…is about a doctor who betrays the principle of empathy. But it is through the empathic act of writing – of putting pen to paper and reckoning with those who have suffered at his hands – that he succeeds in recovering his humanity and coming back from his own living death…plotted with great care.” —The Guardian
"Tell Her Everything is a layered recital of intricately woven hauntings, decisions, and confessions...[A] story that is at once haunting, tender, and gripping." — Chicago Review of Books
A doctor working in a prosperous Middle Eastern city finds himself placed in an unconscionable situation ...
As he prepares for a visit from his long-estranged daughter, Dr K., a retired surgeon enjoying the comforts of retirement in London, rehearses the conversation he will finally have with her. It’s been years since he has seen her, and he has spent much of that time polishing the confession he wants to make to her.
But as her visit draws closer, he finds his memories to be freshly torturous. He recalls leaving his childhood home in India to accept a dream job, working for a state hospital in a prosperous oil monarchy. Suddenly, he'd had access to a lifestyle that he would never have had back home. Money and success came quickly . . . as long as he performed certain tasks for the state. The price for that proved steep and often unbearable, especially to a wife and daughter who watch him walk the perilous path of lifelong ambition.
Tell Her Everything is a tense, visceral, and moving novel about a father's love for his daughter, and about a medical professional grappling with remorse, shame and despair. Recalling the work of Ishiguro, Coetzee and Kafka, it asks: Where does one draw the line between empathy and sacrifice? Between integrity and survival? Between prosperity and love?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Waheed (The Collaborator) explores familial love and morality in this underwhelming account of an Indian father's turbulent relationship with his estranged daughter. Sara Shah was five when her mother died and seven when her father, Kaiser, sent her away to boarding school in the U.S., from their home in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Kaiser, a retired doctor, details his thoughts in an extended interior monologue, as he rehearses what he will tell Sara when she visits as an adult, about her mother, her childhood, and most important, about the painful truth of the job he held while Sara was away, working as a "punishment surgeon" to carry out Hammurabi-style amputations on convicts. Much of the narrative involves Kaiser processing his shame and guilt over his work, a Faustian bargain that came at the expense of a relationship he could have forged with Sara while paying for the opportunities he wanted her to have. There's a good bit of texture on Kaiser's immigrant experience in his otherwise long-winded narration, but a striking lack of detail on Sara's time in the U.S., and a series of letters from her at the end feel tacked on and stilted. The heart is there, but it doesn't quite hang together.
