There was an empty patch at the western edge of the garden, and if anyone could coax mangoes out of that tree it would be Ammoo. La Ilaha Illallah, Muhammad ur Rasul Allah. She stared for a moment at Maya, then clamped the tiffin carrier between her knees, pulled out a string of prayer beads and began to mutter the Kalma under her breath. ‘Rajshahi tree, it belongs in Rajshahi.’Īn old lady with a tiffin carrier slid into the space beside her. ‘Tree won’t live,’ the farmer who sold it to her said. The tree had been difficult to wrap it was heavier than it looked and bulged awkwardly where the roots were packed in soil. Maya’s thoughts rested for a moment on this fact as she settled herself on the wooden bench in the third-class carriage, balancing on her lap the sum of all her worldly possessions: a small rucksack containing two saris, a kameez, a pair of trainers, a doctor’s case with a stetho and, for her mother, a young mango tree.

It would not have been possible to go home if Silvi hadn’t died. (Aug.Excerpted from The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam (Harper Collins Books, 2011). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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).