Poets & Writers

Fatima Farheen Mirza

whose debut novel, A Place for Us, was published in June by SJP for Hogarth.

INTRODUCED BY

Garth Greenwell author of the novel What Belongs to You, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016.

I always cringe a little when a novel is called “wise.” I have a hard time trusting writers who try to convey a sense of knowingness, of being secure in their own knowledge. And yet, as I finished reading Fatima, published in June as the first title from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint at Hogarth, I found myself feeling grateful to it for something I can only call wisdom. The novel, which follows an Indian Muslim family in America whose foundation is fractured by the warring pulls of modernity and tradition, is distinctive in its deep understanding of how families work, of how they’re run through with tiny fissures and bound together by a love that is inseparable from injury.

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