A SYDNEY MORNING HERALD BEST YOUNG NOVELISTShortlisted for the NSW Premiers Literary Awards - Multicultural NSWThe past is calling him home ...As a prospective barrister, Zaid Saban is on the cusp of achieving everything he has dreamed of. His social and professional world is far removed from his schoolyard days in the suburbs of western Sydney, even more far removed from the traumatic events of his final year of sc...

‘An incisive meditation on devotion, desire and double standards.’ – Sarah Malik, author of Desi Girl and SafarA stunning debut novel that follows the intertwined lives of three friends as they navigate the complexities of university life, adherence to their faith, and the transition into adulthood.Bound together by their shared beliefs and alienation from wider Australian society, Sara, Abida and Naeem are drawn to their university’s Muslim Students’ Assoc...

How do you balance desire, ambition and expectations?Feeling alienated from wider society, Sara, Abida and Naeem gravitate towards their university’s Muslim Students’ Association. Within its austere confines, Sara watches Naeem. Over time, the pair commence a furtive relationship outside of the gaze of their families and peers. But Naeem is especially burdened by the widening gap between his public façade and their clandestine forays.As the MSA elections approach, Abida see...

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.“Masood’s novel presents a stereoscopic, three-dimensional view of contemporary Muslim America: the way historical conflict in the Middle East lingers in individual lives, the way gossip travels in a close-knit immigrant community.” —The New York Tim...

The Youth of God tells the story of Nuur, a sensitive and academically gifted seventeen-year-old boy growing up in Toronto’s Somali neighbourhood, as he negotiates perilously between the calling of his faith and his intellectual ambitions. Trying to influence him are a radical Muslim imam and a book-loving, dedicated teacher who shares his background. In its telling, this novel reveals the alienated lives of Somali youth in an environment riddled with crime and unemployment, while...

PLAYING CARDS IN CAIRO is a fly-on-the-wall account - like THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL - of life (for western readers) in a strange and exotic environment. Hugh Miles lives in Cairo and is engaged to an Egyptian woman. Twice a week he plays cards with a small group of Arab, Muslim women and through this medium he explores their lives in modern Cairo, the greatest of Arab cities. It is a secretive, romantic, often deprived but always soulful existence for the women as they struggle with abusive...

A coffee seller waits all day for one of his customers to ask him how he is, until eventually he just tells the city itself...A teenager is ordered off a bus at a checkpoint and told he must kiss a complete stranger if he wants the bus to be let through...A woman pilgrimages to the Cave of the Prophets, to pray for rain for her tiny patch of land, knowing it will take more than water to save it...Unlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new tow...

"All girls [should read] The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis." — Malala Yousafzai, New York TimesThe first book in Deborah Ellis’s riveting Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan’s ca...

Major-General Farhan Al-Balawi is a loyal soldier in the Saudi Arabian army who dotes on his beloved daughter, Maryam, his pride in her learning and independent spirit sharpened by the death of his elder son and his estrangement from the younger who has opted to pursue a hedonistic western lifestyle in the USA. Despite the love she shares with her family, her respect for her father, the pride she takes in her Arabian heritage and her loyalty to Islam, Maryam yearns for travel and the opportun...

In the dark of night, Hanan al-Hashimi awakens from a nightmare, confused and shaken. Roaming the house in search of some reassurance, she is drawn towards the streak of light under her husband's bedroom door. Little does she know that the beckoning glow will turn her life on its head...

**“Ingenious… Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.” —The New York TimesWINNER OF THE 2018 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION****FINALIST FOR THE 2019 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEThe suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences, from the author of Best of Friends**Isma is free...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR, THE KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE AND TWO SASKATCHEWAN BOOK AWARDSZarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She’s just as likely to be agonizing over which sparkly earrings will “pimp out” her hijab as to be flirting with the Walmart meat manager in a futile attempt to secure halal chicken the day before Eid. “Little Mosque on the Prairie” brought Zarqa’s own laugh-out-loud take on her everyday culture clash to viewer...