This book is more about migration and belonging. This is when we last encountered Maya Haque, as a doctor in the mid 1980s struggling to come to terms with the radicalisation of her brother and the limits of her own political will. “There is never a moment when we lose sight of the upheaval of Dhaka in 1971, but Anam adroitly weaves these stories into the personal lives of her characters.”įour years later, The Good Muslim took the story forward a generation, examining “the consequences of war, the hazards of an uneasy peace, the gains and losses of nation-building, the rewriting of history”. “Throughout the novel Anam deftly balances the story of nation against that of family,” wrote reviewer Kamila Shamsie. Hailed as “a stunning debut”, it was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award and won a Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first novel. A Golden Age, published in 2007, told the story of widowed Rehana, separated from her children by a family rift that mirrors the geo-political fracture that freed Bangladesh from Pakistan. Knotty questions of class and identity underpin the latest novel, which wears its connections with the earlier volumes in the trilogy lightly. There is another reason, besides historical accident, for Zubaida’s sense of insignificance: she is an orphan, adopted as a baby into the well-to-do world of the childless Maya Haque.
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