Fatima Farheen Mirza is a 26-year-old graduate from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her first book, A Place For Us, has been chosen by actress Sarah Jessica Parker as the first title for her new imprint with publisher Penguin Random House.
The novel revolves around the fictional marriage of a woman named Hadia, the eldest daughter of an Indian-American Muslim family living in California. The marriage surfaces intergenerational tensions between the American-born children of the family and their immigrant parents. Random House described the book as a “poignant portrait of a family caught between two cultures, and a resonant story of faith, tradition, identity, and belonging in contemporary America.”
Ms. Parker says the book speaks to our times. “It allows [the] reader to better understand what it means to reconcile one’s love of family and culture with a desire to find one’s own path, and one’s own faith. Ms. Mirza painstakingly details the life of an Indian Muslim family in America and their children’s search to feel whole, fulfilled, and content.”
Ms. Mirza is an award-winning writer and teacher, and says she worked on the book for eight years. “I was interested in exploring what it means when to be loyal to oneself is to betray the home you have come from, the bond between siblings as well as their betrayals, and the decisions that each character makes that determines not only their own destiny, but also the lives of their loved ones.”
A Place for Us is slated to be published in 2019.
Check out this post on another Muslim American novelist!
