The Bones of Grace

April 25, 2016
Anam’s final installment in her Bengal trilogy (after A Golden Age and The Good Muslim) follows the life of Zubaida Haque, a young, wealthy Bangladeshi woman who falls for Elijah in Boston, shortly before her departure for an archeological dig in Pakistan. But when the dig is abruptly shortened before the archeologists uncover the entire skeleton of “the walking whale,” Zubaida returns to her adopted parents in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and agrees to marry her best friend from childhood, Rashid. Her restlessness leads her to help a British filmmaker in Chittagong with a documentary showing the dismantling of a ship, and she is surprised to note that a beautiful, intact piano is still aboard. Zubaida calls Elijah and asks him to visit her, appealing to his love of music to entice him to come see the piano. The time Zubaida spends with Elijah is magical and illuminating for her, and she is forced to make some very difficult personal choices. In having Zubaida come to terms with her origins and her own contentment, Anam captures two very different cultures in an introspective character study that will mesmerize readers from the very first page.

January 1, 2016

A Granta Best Young British Novelist, Anam completes her "Bengal Trilogy," begun sparklingly with A Golden Age (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book) and continued with The Good Muslim (a New Yorker Best Book of the Year). The Haque family saga is handed over to Zubaida Haque, who rebels against her role as a traditional Bangladeshi wife.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2016
With this story about a contemporary Harvard-educated Bangladeshi woman struggling to be true to herself as well as her heritage, Anam completes her three-generation trilogy about Bangladesh. Anam's A Golden Age (2008) tells the story of the Bangladesh civil war against Pakistan through the eyes of a widow who makes self-sacrificing choices for the sake of her children. Set more than a decade later, The Good Muslim (2011) focuses on the widow's daughter, Maya, now a doctor. Now comes this book-length narrative from Maya's adopted daughter, Zubaida, to Elijah, the American lover she has forsaken but hopes to win back with her written explanation, a form that allows Anam to introduce names and snatches of information as foreshadowings that she fleshes out later. A highly educated paleontologist, Zubaida always expected to return home to Bangladesh and marry Rashid, whom she's known all her life as the son of her parents' closest friends. But then she meets philosophy grad-school dropout Elijah at a Shostakovich concert only days before leaving her lab in Cambridge for a dig in Pakistan. The chemistry is immediate, and when Zubaida gets to Pakistan, they communicate through song lyrics. But the dig, where she hoped to find the complete skeleton of Ambulocetus natans, a whale that lived on both land and in the sea, goes tragically wrong. Zubaida flies home to Bangladesh, where Rashid presses marriage. Longing for Elijah, she finally lets Rashid's and their families' wishes prevail, but one day into the marriage she realizes "the depths of [her] mistake." After a miscarriage, she finds temporary respite interviewing mistreated workers taking apart ships in the port town of Chittagong. There, her romantic confusion comes to a crisis point, as does her growing obsession with finding her biological roots. Taken alone, the narrator's self-absorption would be grating, but her story resonates powerfully within the saga of three generations of women personifying Bangladesh's evolution from the clarity of revolution to the confusions of assimilation with the larger world.

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May 15, 2016

Shortly before leaving for Pakistan to join a dig for a whale fossil, Zubaida (Zee) Haque, a Harvard-trained paleontologist, meets Elijah Strong, a recent PhD dropout, at a Shostakovich concert and sparks fly between them. What follows is a lengthy confessional from Zee to Elijah, recounting her troubled history as the privileged adopted daughter of a well-known Bangladeshi couple and her search to uncover the truth about her origins. After the expedition is derailed by government soldiers, who arrest and torture one of the team members and order the others out of the country, a traumatized Zee returns home to Dhaka and rashly agrees to marry her childhood sweetheart. Yet she remains distressed by unresolved feelings for Elijah and her unknown parenthood, and before long, is off again, this time joining a filmmaker investigating the slavelike working conditions on salvage ships, the newest of which is Grace, a decommissioned passenger liner. There she meets a crew member who may provide a link to her past. VERDICT An engrossing tale set in an unfamiliar landscape that is both a love story and a glimpse into the lives of people living and working in the most unfortunate circumstances. Recommended for most readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/15.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.