A Place for Us

Fatima Mirza is brilliant and this novel will break your heart and make it new again

Garth Greenwell

‘Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty. It is so deeply imagined, so intimately attentive to and solicitous of the lives it follows, so artful in describing the inseparable human experiences of pride and resentment, humility and loyalty -- and, most of all, love – that it feels not as if we are reading a novel about this Indian Muslim family struggling with tradition and a new culture, but as if we become actual members of the family. It is that immersive, that brilliant, that true’

Paul Harding, Pulizer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

A Place for Us is a radiantly envisioned, beautifully achieved epic about nearly everything that matters: love, family, faith, freedom, betrayal, contrition, absolution. Fatima Farheen Mirza is a magnificent new voice

Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno

Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a radiant debut. It accretes its power, beauty, and insight through its tender witnessing of private and family life. With her deeply compassionate view, Mirza dignifies terrain often desecrated by contemporary culture: maternity, faith, the bonds of community, the yearning for goodness, and our duty to others. She shows us the destructiveness of our doubt in those we love, and the mercy of forgiveness. Most wondrously, with this felt and moving novel, Mirza creates a place in which rebellion and reverence seem to embrace

Charmaine Craig, author of Miss Burma

A brilliant, highly readable contemporary tale of identity and belonging

Elle

This powerful, intricate debut is essential reading

NoViolet Bulawayo, Man Booker-shortlisted author of We Need New Names