Title: The Good Muslim
Author: Tahmima Anam
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: August 2, 2011
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN: 978-0061478765
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

From prizewinning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam comes her deeply moving second novel about the rise of Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh, seen through the intimate lens of a family.

Pankaj Mishra praised A Golden Age, Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, as a “startlingly accomplished and gripping novel that describes not only the tumult of a great historical event . . . but also the small but heroic struggles of individuals living in the shadow of revolution and war.” In her new novel, The Good Muslim, Anam again deftly weaves the personal and the political, evoking with great skill and urgency the lasting ravages of war and the competing loyalties of love and belief.

In the dying days of a brutal civil war, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come. . . . Almost a decade later, Sohail’s sister, Maya, returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader. And when Sohail decides to send his son to a madrasa, the conflict between brother and sister comes to a devastating climax. Set in Bangladesh at a time when religious fundamentalism is on the rise, The Good Muslim is an epic story about faith, family, and the long shadow of war.

My Review:

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam is a poignant and compelling story about family, love and commitment amidst the turmoils in Bangladesh brought on by religious extremism. Exploring how a developing nation struggles to survive following war and tenuous peace, there is tension in this story as readers see the toll the countrywide issues have taken on Sohail Haque and his sister Maya, who after being separated from her brother for several years, finds him transformed by the toils of a country that is also undergoing transformation. Through masterfully-crafted prose, Anam examines the long reach of war and how one family is forever impacted by violence from a war that is now passed. The main characters are well-developed, to the extent that one feels immersed in their experiences, knowing and witnessing primarily through the eyes of Maya in whose perspective Anam principally writes. This complex and emotional drama is both moving and devastating, providing numerous avenues to explore through book discussion groups. While this novel flows from Anam’s debut book A Golden Age, which I have not yet read, I did not feel as though I missed anything by first picking up The Good Muslim which I recommend to all fans of dramatic fiction.

About the Author:

Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in Paris, Bangkok, and New York. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her writing has been published in Granta, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. A Golden Age, her first novel, was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. She lives in London and Dhaka.

I received a complimentary ARC of The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam from Harper Collins.  Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

Title: This Beautiful Life
Author: Helen Schulman
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: August 2, 2011
Hardcover: 240 pages
ISBN: 978-0062024381
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:
When the Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York City, they’re not quite sure how they’ll adapt—or what to make of the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan. Soon, though, Richard is consumed by his executive role at a large New York university, and Liz, who has traded in her academic career to oversee the lives of their children, is hectically ferrying young Coco around town.

Fifteen-year-old Jake is gratefully taken into the fold by a group of friends at Wildwood, an elite private school.

But the upper-class cocoon in which they have enveloped themselves is ripped apart when Jake wakes up one morning after an unchaperoned party and finds an email in his in-box from an eighth-grade admirer. Attached is a sexually explicit video she has made for him. Shocked, stunned, maybe a little proud, and scared—a jumble of adolescent emotion—he forwards the video to a friend, who then for-wards it to a friend. Within hours, it’s gone viral, all over the school, the city, the world.

The ensuing scandal threatens to shatter the Bergamots’ sense of security and identity, and, ultimately, their happiness. They are a good family faced with bad choices, and how they choose to react, individually and at one another’s behest, places everything they hold dear in jeopardy.

This Beautiful Life is a devastating exploration of the blurring boundaries of privacy and the fragility of self, a clear-eyed portrait of modern life that will have readers debating their assumptions about family, morality, and the sacrifices and choices we make in the name of love.

My Review:

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman is a shocking, yet realistic story about how, in this age of electronic information and communications, a single poorly-conceived decision or action can profoundly damage relationships that took a lifetime to build.  Schulman takes readers through the emotional family drama that the well-to-do Bergamot family experiences after Richard and Liz Bergamot’s son, Jake, chooses to pass along a private, sexually-explicit video that he received to a friend.  In what could easily play out in various forms in families everywhere, this story is an honest, believable, and tragic example of the frailty of our emotions so easily irreversibly altered by a poor choice coupled with the modern-age devices we find so convenient.  Readers will find realistic characters with relatable flaws and reactions to the stressors of life while also being drawn into the drama as Schulman reveals the path chosen by this family and the critical decision points that illuminate it.  Weighing heavily on readers’ emotions This Beautiful Life would make for a thought-provoking discussion group pick.

About the Author:

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day at the Beach, P.S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, and the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. An associate professor of writing at The New School, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

I received a complimentary arc of This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman from Harper Collins. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.