The Writing On My Forehead
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Free-spirited and rebellious, Saira has grown up in California with her beautiful, obedient sister Ameena. From childhood, she has broken the boundaries between her desire for independence and her family's traditions - in particular, her Bombay-bred mother's idea of how girls should behave. Now, hungry for experience and curious about the world, Saira travels to Karachi for a wedding, and stumbles on family secrets that will shape the rest of her life.
It's the beginning of a journey of understanding and reconciliation that goes back three generations. Further surprises are to come as Saira visits London and discovers the political forces that have driven her father's family, in India and in England. As her background gradually reveals itself, Saira finds that the battles she faces - over love, belonging and fulfilment - have faced others before, and comes to realise that her many-layered inheritance is a thing to be treasured.
In a beautifully written and deeply moving narrative, Nafisa Haji explores issues of displacement and belonging and the lure of family, home and tradition versus career and the excitement of the wider world - for men as well as women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haji traces in her impressive debut the fortunes of a family divided by secrets and lies as much as by the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. Saira Qader, an American teenager of Indo-Pakistani descent, lives a sheltered life in California with her older sister, Ameena, and their overprotective and fiercely traditional parents. Saira's view of her family changes dramatically when she attends a wedding in Karachi and learns that her mother had lied to her about Saira's grandfather: he is not dead but living in London with a second family. As she learns more about her grandfather's work with Gandhi and the independence movement, Saira dreams of going to college instead of marrying early like her sister, and later carves out a life as a war journalist. But an unforeseen tragedy makes her choose between her peripatetic existence and the more traditional (and perhaps more desirable) setup awaiting her at home. Haji achieves an effortless commingling of family and social history in this intricate story that connects a young woman and her family over continents and through generations.
