Name: Radiant Fugitives
ISBN: 9781640094048

Nawaaz Ahmed

A Novel

Radiant Fugitives

This is one of those literary books that I understand 80% of, but the remaining 20% make me feel like I'm back in first year uni. Probably a 3 star book for me, but I've rounded it because I'm conscious this isn't my usual genre.

The book follows a Muslim-Indian family. Two sisters (one devout, the other queer and cast out from her family in her early 20s) and their mother. The book follows their lives and families in Chennai and the USA, and the intersections and interactions they have and the effect on each others' lives. It was slow going at times, but an interesting read.

This is one of those literary books that I understand 80% of, but the remaining 20% make me feel like I'm back in first year uni. Probably a 3 star book for me, but I've rounded it because I'm conscious this isn't my usual genre.

The book follows a Muslim-Indian family. Two sisters (one devout, the other queer and cast out from her family in her early 20s) and their mother. The book follows their lives and families in Chennai and the USA, and the intersections and interactions they have and the effect on each others' lives. It was slow going at times, but an interesting read.

A dazzling, operatic debut novel following three generations of a Muslim Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change. Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children. But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself. Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.

Radiant Fugitives A Novel

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