Rav Grewal-Kök’s first novel,
The Snares, is published by Random House.
[
Q&A with Rav Grewal-Kök]
His stories have appeared in
The Atlantic,
Ploughshares, the
New England Review,
Missouri Review,
Gulf Coast,
The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at
Fence.
Grewal-Kök grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles.
At Electric Lit the author tagged
eight books "that address the depredations of the state ... [yet] offer consolation. They show that the bad times aren’t ours alone." One title on the list:
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
A free retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire is the rare mainstream literary novel to treat the Muslim victims of the West’s “War on Terror” as fully human. Parvaiz Pasha, a young British man of Pakistani descent, 
leaves for Syria. He hopes to meet the militants who fought alongside his father, a jihadi who died after American interrogators tortured him at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan. Parvaiz never finds his father’s compatriots. Instead, ISIS operatives coerce Parvaiz into working for that organization’s propaganda arm. When he tries to flee, they kill him. The novel’s central drama turns on the attempt by Parvaiz’s twin sister, Aneeka, to return his body to England for burial. But the Home Secretary, Karramat Lone, another British man of Pakistani origin, publicly revoked Parvaiz’s citizenship when he joined ISIS. Out of political expediency and his own monstrous ambition, Lone refuses Aneeka’s request. Lone’s pitilessness will have devastating consequences, for his own family and for the Pashas. I read the final fifty pages of this novel with an exquisite sense of dread. Shamsie’s narrative design is impeccable.
Read about
another entry on the list.
Home Fire is among
Sophie Ratcliffe's five best books about siblings.
--Marshal Zeringue
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