If poetry is emotion rendered incendiary, then Forugh Farrokhzad was made of fire. For the sin of revolutionary frankness in a time of deep, patriarchal conservatism, Iran’s modernist icon suffered greatly—accused of immorality, forbidden from seeing her child, even confined for a time to an “asylum.” Decades after her death in 1967, she continued to pay a price—the hard-line Islamist government that eventually took over Iran would go on to ban much of her work. A printing press that refused to stop publishing her poems was burned to the ground.

Forugh’s life—short, tragic but marked by poetic genius—forms the basis for Jasmin Darznik’s vivid first novel. Iranian-born Darznik traces Forugh’s tumultuous 32 years and, through them, the story of midcentury Persian society. Effectively a fictionalized biography, Song of a Captive Bird is an unsparing account of the necessity and consequences of speaking out.

From the book’s opening scene—a brutal account of Forugh’s subjection to a so-called “virginity test”—the novel details the myriad ways in which a young female poet attempting to pierce the heart of a male-led art form is made to suffer indignities for her audacity. At first ignored, then condemned, then made a public spectacle for her poems, in particular those in which she explores themes of desire and sexuality, Forugh’s story is as relevant today as it was during her lifetime.

Writing from a place of deep reverence for her central character, Darznik crafts a sensory experience, an Iran whose sights and sounds and scents feel neither superficial nor trivially exotic. The result is a well-honed novel about the meaning of rebellion—what happens when a poet of singular talent decides “that it’s shame, not sin, that’s unholy.”

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A State of Freedom, Neel Mukherjee’s bleak but beautifully constructed third novel, offers five loosely connected stories set in modern-day India. Five characters from diverse backgrounds experience displacement and devastation as they move from east to west, from village to city—even from life to death.

Mukherjee’s empathy for the underdog is apparent in the creation of his most resilient characters. Milly, who works as a maid, is forced to arrange her own kidnapping after her employers refuse to let her out of their house. Lakshman, whose chance encounter with a bear cub convinces him to leave his family, roams from village to village with the animal that he slowly trains to dance (though the training is extremely violent and gruesome, and may prove difficult for sensitive readers). Equally compelling is the London publisher visiting his parents in Bombay who defies strict cultural etiquette to involve himself in the personal life of the family cook, Renu. This almost comic piece, which has the domestic richness and class-consciousness of “Downton Abbey,” takes a grimmer turn when the publisher visits the village of the cook’s impoverished extended family.

With recurring characters and motifs throughout its disparate chapters, A State of Freedom echoes the structure and themes of V.S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning novel, In a Free State (1971), which also focused on the international effects of political and social disruption in five distinct stories. There’s also a bit of Henry James in the discernible tensions between Old World complexity and New World innocence, as well as the interplay between real life and the ghostly realm of the dead. But this is no pastiche; Mukherjee’s depiction of social inequalities and his belief that even the lowliest person has a story to be told is very much his own.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve begins sharply, as Peri, a wealthy, middle-aged Turkish woman, makes her way to a dinner party. Suddenly, Peri finds herself face to face with a mugger, who takes her purse and shakes free its contents, including a cherished Polaroid.

Watching the Polaroid flutter to the ground, Peri recalls her early days at Oxford University, a time of personal uncertainty about the existence of God. She and the two women from the photograph—the devout Mona and the skeptical Shirin—are “the three daughters of Eve,” and together they take a seminar on God. Peri is instantly smitten with the mysterious professor, and as he pushes her to question her beliefs, she falls deeper for him—and begins to panic.

The novel alternates between the present—as Peri encounters snobby members of Istanbul’s middle class at the dinner party—and her traumatic memories of what happened with her professor. In striking, lovely language, Shafak considers Islamophobia, teacher-student relationships and terrorism of many kinds. Fresh and timely, this is an approachable novel of big ideas.

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The smells are the tip-off that something bad is about to happen. To use the Jamaican slang from Augustown, Kei Miller’s excellent new novel, the April 1982 day in which a calamitous event is about to occur is “the day of the autoclaps,” a day of impending disaster, trouble on top of trouble.

At first, the day doesn’t seem unusual, but the woman at the center of this novel set in the poor, eponymous Jamaican town certainly is. Ganja-smoking Ma Taffy was blinded many years earlier when hundreds of rats crashed through her ceiling and attacked her eyes. The injury heightened her sense of smell: She can detect ripening mangoes and Otaheite apples as well as the tragedy that will involve her great-nephew, 6-year-old Kaia, and a group known as Babylon.

Kaia comes home from school one day—he lives with Ma Taffy and his mother, Gina—with his dreadlocks cut off. His teacher, a stern man who struggles to comb out his afro and fears his move to the city will result in “the weakening of his moral fortitude,” hacked off the Rastafarian boy’s dreads. This act of violence sets off a series of events and recollections, including the story of Alexander Bedward, the 1920s town preacher who claimed that he could fly; and the school’s modern-day principal, a wealthy white woman who hires Gina to be her housekeeper without knowing the secret behind the black woman’s connection to her family.

If the novel’s tone is inconsistent, Augustown is nonetheless an accomplished and riveting work, with traces of magical realism. And its central theme is, sadly, all too relevant: Generations change, but prejudices persist.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, June 2017

The sophomore effort of a novelist whose debut made a splash is fraught with high expectations that all too often go unmet. Arundhati Roy presents a special case. It’s been two decades since she won the Booker Prize and wide acclaim for The God of Small Things. But in the intervening years her nonfiction and activism have drawn comparisons to Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, underscores this veer toward politics.

The novel is one of the most polemical in recent memory, and the characters act as animators of these polemics. Expressed with her usual musical precision, Roy’s anger has many targets. The rise of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi is one bête noire. Another is India’s continued possession of the Muslim-majority Kashmir region.

Roy’s first novel arrived weeks before India’s first nuclear test—which she condemned—and commentators saw the novel and the test as assertions of a rising India. Her second novel is an indictment of an India drunk on power, mistreating its poor and minorities. Ever the contrarian, Roy defends Kashmiris who seek self-determination. To Roy this is a matter not only of justice but also of survival—of India as a heterogeneous, secular state and of South Asian civilization. Experts consider Kashmir to be the most likely flashpoint for a nuclear war.

More a mosaic than a traditional, coherent story, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness sometimes resembles James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even in style it ramifies, and Roy’s characters are a jumble—similar to India’s welter of competing adversities, which V.S. Naipaul described as a “million mutinies.” The God of Small Things was a lively, virtuosic performance. In its successor, disgust is a recurring theme, and Indian media will likely pan it for anti-Indian propensities. But Roy’s love for the people of India is clear. She doesn’t hate India; what she hates is oppression.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

American involvement in Cambodia during the Vietnam War was often called a “sideshow.” Bombing of the countryside displaced the population and destabilized the government, which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Music of the Ghosts by survivor Vaddey Ratner only touches on American culpability, but the grueling, heart-wrenching novel indicts any treatment of Cambodia as mere footnote.

The novel concerns a woman named Teera, who, like the author, lost her father, escaped Cambodia to America and attended Cornell. Teera returns to Cambodia to meet a man known as the Old Musician, who claims to have known her father. The Old Musician—once a pupil of Pol Pot, who was a teacher before becoming leader of the Khmer Rouge—ended up in one of the regime’s prisons, where officials tried to extract confessions to confirm their paranoia. There, the Old Musician often shared a cell with Teera’s father.

The novel thus splits in two. On the one hand are Teera’s impressions of her unknown native country. On the other are the Old Musician’s memories of life under “the Organization.”

Through Teera, Ratner seems keen to show present-day Cambodia as recovered from the war, if nothing else to offer contrast to the book’s darker chapters. Teera admits her time in America has made her a reflexive optimist, but the war keeps dimming her rose-colored glasses. The landscape is scarred by bombs. Social relations remain tense. In an unforgettable passage, Ratner describes a woman whose job is to remove mines, but she later replaces them, as otherwise she’d be out of work. Thus the never-ending parade of amputees perpetuates on Cambodia’s streets.

The novel isn’t unending desolation. On the contrary, it is often very sweet, told with a careful lyricism that sometimes gets the better of the plot. Occasionally calling to mind Things Fall Apart, another novel about collapsed societies, Music of the Ghosts evokes a world with ghosts aplenty, but less apt by Ratner’s hand to be dismissed as a sideshow.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.