The Good Muslim

Description

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. Her old friends have been seduced by the lure of new money, her city streets have been renamed and the freedom she had once yearned for is a long-forgotten dream. 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 come to grips with her brother's radicalism, Maya will be forced to rethink what it means to be a good daughter, sister, friend and citizen 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.

Tahmima Anam's first novel A Golden Age won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book Award.

"An unforgettable journey through a young nation trying to define itself." - Kamila Shamsie. "Its delicacy and power and breadth - the way its compassion and grief keep complicating its anger - I read it with heart in mouth." - Helen Garner. "Delicate, heart-wrenching and poetic, this is a novel of great poise and power." - Tash Aw