Monday, December 14, 2015

Eight top books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam

Laila Lalami's most recent book, The Moor’s Account, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. At the Washington Post she tagged eight books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam, including:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid (2007)

Borrowing from Camus’s “The Fall,” Hamid tells this novel in the form of a single dramatic monologue. Changez, a Pakistani immigrant, has a charmed life: He graduated from Princeton, he has a job at a top valuation firm in New York, and he recently started dating a beautiful woman. But this life is abruptly upended by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and Changez finds his perceptions and allegiances shifting, with potentially disastrous consequences.
Read about another book on the list.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is among Porochista Khakpour's top ten novels about 9/11, Jimmy So's five best 9/11 novels, and Ahmede Hussain's five top books in recent South Asian literature.

The Page 69 Test: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

--Marshal Zeringue