The Reader's Shelf—After The Kite Runner: Book Club Picks

By Nancy Pearl -- Library Journal, 4/1/2006

If your book club has already read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (and I don't know of a group that hasn't), try these other titles that touch on many of the same issues raised in these megapopular books.

When Najwa and her family are exiled in London after a coup overthrows the Sudanese government and rebels hang her father, she turns for comfort to her Islamic faith—long abandoned in her ultrasecular upbringing—in Leila Aboulela's Minaret (Black Cat: Grove. 2005. ISBN 0-8021-7014-5. pap. $13). What is so interesting to discuss is whether readers believe that Najwa's conversion is presented realistically as an outgrowth of her situation rather than as occurring like a bolt out of the blue. Debate also how Aboulela's portrayal of women in the Islamic faith differs from what is depicted in novels by Nadeem Aslam (see below), Kamila Shamsie (see below), and Monica Ali.

Kamila Shamsie's engrossing Broken Verses (Harvest: Harcourt. 2005. ISBN 0-15-603053-5. pap. $14) takes place in Pakistan following the events of September 11, 2001. Aasmaani Akram's mother, Samina, a feminist and political activist, went missing 14 years before; her mother's lover, Pakistan's best-known poet, disappeared two years before that, perhaps murdered in prison. But when Aasmaani receives a letter, written in a code only known to herself and the lovers, she begins to believe that the poet is alive and in communication with her mother. Beautiful writing, an unexpected but plausible ending, and a penetrating look at the realities of challenging the status quo in a repressive regime all combine to make this an unforgettable read. Consider whether or not you could predict the ending.

Nadeem Aslam's gorgeously written, albeit tragically painful Maps for Lost Lovers (Knopf. 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4242-9. $25) seems particularly relevant these days, given the 2005 London tube bombings. In Aslam's novel, the daily lives of first-generation Pakistani immigrants might take place in an English town they refer to as the Desert of Loneliness, but their real selves stubbornly remain in Pakistan. For these unassimilated men and women, the mores of English society are less relevant than the Muslim law of their native land. Thus, when lovers Chanda and Jungnu are murdered, probably by Chanda's brothers to avenge their sister's shame, it throws the town's residents into conflict. This is played out in the relationship between Shamas, Jungnu's brother, and his wife, Kaukab, who has alienated their British-born children with her staunch Muslim fundamentalism. Aslam doesn't shrink from describing the abysmal treatment of women under Islamic law, the conflict between Eastern and Western beliefs, or the struggle to live under one set of laws when your heart is with another. Ask your members whether they feel that Aslam has any sympathy for Kaukab.

In The Namesake (Mariner: Houghton. 2004. ISBN 0-618-48522-8. pap. $14), Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of two generations of the Ganguli family, but the novel's real heart is Gogol Ganguli, who grows up both Indian and American. This quietly powerful novel is about assimilation, the bonds of families, the pain of leaving a homeland, and the joys and frustrations of love. How universal are the Gangulis' experiences as immigrants?

For groups interested in reading nonfiction set in the same region, Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon. 2004. illus. ISBN 0-375-71457-X. pap. $11.95), is the occasionally humorous and (mostly) irredeemably tragic tale of her childhood in Iran during the last days of the Shah's repressive regime and the early period of the equally repressive Islamic Revolution. Ask your group to consider how the drawings and text interact with one another and if the story could have been told as effectively without the art.

Jason Elliot's perceptive and evocative An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (Picador: St. Martin's. 2001. ISBN 0-312-28846-8. pap. $18) is part history lesson and part travelog. Elliot first traveled to Afghanistan from Britain in the 1980s, where he hooked up with Afghan mujahadin fighting the occupying Soviet armies. Returning ten years later, he reconnected with old friends and met many members of the Northern Alliance, now engaged in a losing guerrilla war with the Taliban.

You might want to consider devoting two (or even three) meetings to Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Pr. 2004. ISBN 1-59420-007-6. $29.95; pap. ISBN 0-14-303466-9. $16). Coll, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist, describes (with meticulous attention to detail, buttressed by nonintrusive endnotes) the disaster of U.S. policy in the Middle East and Central Asia. Have your group examine what impact the history Coll discusses has had on current events in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.