AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “5 UNDER 35” NOMINEE • NEW YORK’S “ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK” PICK Named One of the Best Books of the Year: Washington Post • NPR • People • Refinery29 • Parade • BuzzFeed “Mirza writes with a mercy that encompasses all things.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post Hailed as “a book for our times” (Christiane Amanpour), A Place for Us is a deeply … Charles, Washington Post
Hailed as “a book for our times” (Christiane Amanpour), A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging.
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?
A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.
A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
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An interesting look into the lives and struggles of first generation American children of immigrants from India. This is an exceptional book.
This book made me weep! I rarely have books affect me the way this one did. This family is so inspirational, and I was touched by the beauty of the Muslim beliefs that they had. My favorite thing about this book was how realistic it is. It shows so beautifully what it’s like to be a part of a family (meaning that no one really knows what they’re doing) and how our interactions affect each other. It was so beautiful and tragic, but also hopeful. This one will stay with me for a long time.
Prose for our turbulent time. Moving and poetic with an important message of family, religion and cultural identity.
This is a book on what it means to be an American family today. It follows a Muslim couple, newly married, arranged by their parents from India to their new life in the US and raising a family with three kids, treading between two cultures and identities. This book resonates with me and my Vietnamese American experience in finding a place for myself in the world just as this family has and countless other families. If you read one book this year, this might just be the one for you. It’s not light and fluffy, it begs the question of parents’ frailty, foibles, and misgivings as they navigate through parenthood within a traditional culture and religion, and how this experience shapes relationships with their children. Will their be redemption and forgiveness on both sides? Read it!
A beautifully written story about family dynamics in a Muslim American family–but it’s applicable to every family, every parent, every child navigating a complex set of relationships with the ones you love. Incredibly interesting to see various points of view of the same events–makes for a story that will move you and stay with you, because it’s so much more than you expect.
Great view into another culture. Arm-chair traveling!
Interesting look at the Muslim traditions and family life. A lot of repetition.
It’s fitting that the year’s last book should also be one of the best. Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us is a provocative, heartrending read that opens with a family wedding: eldest daughter Hadia is getting married – a love match, not arranged – and has invited her estranged younger brother to be present for her big day.
From that opening, Mirza’s story spins backward in time, to Hadia’s parents own wedding – arranged – and the lives they forged in California, far from their beginnings half-a-world away. The family’s story, the births of Hadia, younger daughter Huda, and son Amar, unfold gradually, in snapshots recalled from the perspective of different family members. A Place for Us is the story of family life, notably, of the thousand little hurts that accumulate, the sibling rivalries, offhand comments, sideways glances whose damage is greater than a single, great betrayal.
This particular iteration of a story as old as time explores the immigrant experience and the experience of being Muslim in America in the years after September 11, but the framework is the shared experience of belonging to a family in which the members do not always understand one another, and the cumulative damage such misunderstandings can wreak over time. What makes Mirza’s work so impressively powerful is that for much of the book, nothing really happens. This isn’t a book about which one can easily write a complete synopsis; relatively early I even debated putting it down, so unassuming and ordinary was the plot. It’s only as the book reaches its conclusion that it all becomes clear, and my admiration for what Mirza accomplished here, complete.
Five stars.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2019/12/a-place-for-us.html)
I would not have bothered to review this book but I was sent an email and asked to do so. This book was way too long, repetitive and boring. I almost gave up on it a few times (something I rarely do) and then had to resort to what other unhappy readers did – that is to start to skim whole sections. I have been to India and loved it and I love reading books about India and Indians in the US but this book was a chore. I have no idea how it was placed on so many acclaimed lists.
I heard this author speak at the 2018 Texas Book Festival and knew I had to read her book. She said she wrote her story from multiple viewpoints because no one person knew the whole story. It’s about an Indian Muslim family in America, trying to find their place somewhere between tradition and modernity, between pride and prejudice. Each family member—the parents and their son and two daughters—experiences the struggle in their own way and tells their own part of the story.
What an incredible insight into sometimes painful, always real, family dynamics.
This book was beautifuly written and I learned so much about the indian culture and traditions. The plot kind of dragged a bit for me.
I learned so much about other cultures and how difficult it is to acclimate in a new country. I have so much compassion and heartache for the family in this book, but they also have happiness and a profound love for one another. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books in my seventy years on earth, but this is the only book that ever drove me to put my head on the table and sob at its ending. A truly superb novel!
A friend recommended this book to me from her book club. I dove into the book & couldn’t stop. A really good story about a family & troubles they all go through. Also learned about the India culture. Very good read & I recommend it.
The characters were stunningly realistic. Your heart went out to this family who tried so hard to fit in and failed even with each other.
Life is not easy and what is right or wrong is not the same for us all.
Under any trapping, people are people and fascinating.
Loved this book. Beautiful story
I struggled to get through this book because it is so harshly real, there were times I just couldn’t read any more. I can’t at all identify with this Indian-Muslim immigrant family, I a WASP, New England born and bred…..but I fell in love with them, I cheered for them, cried with them, yearned with them, celebrated with them. The characters are richly drawn, human, open – and not. It is a book to savor and think deeply about. It illuminates, without being political, without being ‘preachy’ the life – not the plight – of a family struggling to fit in, struggling to maintain its own traditions at the same time. Don’t miss it, it’s a beautiful read.
This is a beautifully written book about families and the relationships between parents, parents and children, and the children themselves. It revolved around adherence to traditional religious values and practices- in this case Muslin – and how they impacted and affected those relationships. I read it slowly, savoring the author’s thoughts, ideas, and stunning use of language. I was sorry, when I turned the final page, that there wasn’t more.
This is a debut author. She reminds me of Nadia Hashimi. A beautifully written story of an Indian Muslim family in America.
This is not your usual story of an immigrant family struggling to adjust to life in America–far from it. It’s the story of a family whose cultural background just happens to be Indian Muslim, and they share the joys and trials of many other families of all religions and ethnicities. Mirza’s novel is divided into four section, each focused on the point of view of one family member: Eldest daughter Hadia, mother Layla, son Amar, and father Rafik (middle daughter Huda, while not given her own section, plays a role in every family member’s story) The main conflicts revolve around Amar, the youngest child and only son. While his mother loves him unconditionally yet worries about his “difference” from her other children, his father has raised all three of his children with high expectations that Amar simply cannot meet. His sisters (especially Hadia) also try to protect Amar from their father’s harsh dictates and frequent anger and frustration, but eventually, things come to a head, tearing the family apart. Hadia’s section is the most straightforward, simply telling what happened in the past and on her wedding day, the event that begins the novel. Layla’s story struggles to understand both her son and her husband while considering the sacrifices she has made to come to a new country with her new husband. In his section, Amar presents events from his own point of view, dominated by a the sadness of numerous losses. But it is the final section, Rafiq’s, that really tears at the heart. This is a man in pain, a man who simply wanted to raise successful children strong in their faith, but now, late in life, recognizes his mistakes and reveals long-hidden feelings.
Overall, this is a very moving novel, beautifully written. Mirza does a fine job of subtly presenting the differences between Muslim families and others while, more importantly, stressing their similarities. I highly recommend it and look forward to her next book.