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Title details for A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza - Available

A Place for Us

A Novel

by Fatima Farheen Mirza
Deepti Gupta
Audiobook
2 of 6 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 6 copies available
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “5 UNDER 35” NOMINEE • NEW YORK’S “ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK” PICK

Named One of the Best Books of the Year: Washington Post • NPR • People • Refinery29 • Parade • BuzzFeed

“Mirza writes with a mercy that encompasses all things.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
 
Hailed as “a book for our times” (Christiane Amanpour), A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging.

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?
A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.
A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 12, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525633488
      • File size: 479155 KB
      • Duration: 16:38:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Lexile® Measure: 930
    • Text Difficulty: 4-6

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 30, 2018
      Bonds of faith and family strengthen and strangle in this promising but flawed debut, set in a close-knit Indian Muslim community in California. The story opens with the wedding of Hadia, golden child of Layla and Rafiq and older sister to Huda and Amar, skillfully setting up the central tension: why has Amar, the troubled youngest, been absent from the family, and can he be drawn back? The plot then shuffles backward and forward, revisiting plot points with few signposts to let the reader know when exactly key events—an untimely death, the snuffing out of a forbidden relationship, a family-rupturing fight—take place. Perspective alights on various characters, revealing more about some than others; middle child Huda remains nearly opaque, and early references to Rafiq’s violent temper are all but dropped. For the final 80 pages, Rafiq narrates, and the story at last coheres. He delivers a heartrending reflection on his role in his son’s partly self-imposed banishment: “It is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound.” Mirza displays a particular talent for rendering her characters’ innermost emotional lives, signaling a writer to watch.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrators Deepti Gupta and Sunil Malhotra team up to bring listeners this family saga about immigration, tradition, and change. Together they present the dual perspectives of Rafiq and Layla, the mother and father of three very different children. Gupta establishes the complex emotional landscape of a family transplanted from India to the U.S. in the subtle, tender tones of Layla. Malhotra then picks up in Part 4 to give us Rafiq's point of view. The world depicted will feel familiar to anyone who has a complicated family history. Listeners will appreciate the realistic sense of a family in turmoil created by these two narrators. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:930
  • Text Difficulty:4-6

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