> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 30 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761358685
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The Clinging Thing




Iqra would like to be a good daughter, a good sister, a good woman, a good mother.

It has been made clear to her that people owe their lives to one another – to the driver who slows to a stop when she notices a jaywalker, and the roller-coaster operator who spots an improperly fastened harness . . . and Iqra’s mother, who raised her, and the mother before her, who tried to stop the blood.

After the loss of a pregnancy, Iqra returns to her mother's home in the place where she grew up. The past is porous, her recollections fail her, yet she is suffocating with memory.

A couple of hours out of the city, Seam River pulls Iqra back into a state of bewilderment. She revisits the stories of her parents and all the women before her, as dreams, memories, the uncertain and the impossible converge.

The future refuses to take form. She finds wonder.

  • Published: 30 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761358685
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Munira Tabassum Ahmed

Munira Tabassum Ahmed’s work has been published in Best of Australian Poems, Pleiades, The Adroit Journal, Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Liminal, Cordite, and elsewhere. She was the 2022 Kat Muscat Fellow. The Clinging Thing is her first novel.

Praise for The Clinging Thing

Ahmed strikes a moving balance between the precise, the elegiac, and the profound. How exciting to be immersed in a novel with such transcendent ambitions.

Jumaana Abdu

The Clinging Thing is a tender, clear-eyed coming-of-age novel about grief, faith, hope and the women who make our freedom possible. Munira writes with a strikingly distinct voice, bringing Bangladeshi-Australian life and Western Sydney to the centre of the literary landscape in a story that will resonate with younger and older readers alike.

Simon Rannard