Synopses & Reviews
A BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, OPRAH DAILY, AND NYLON
In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this sweeping family saga... with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for (Entertainment Weekly).
Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris's attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father's long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children.
But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love — a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself.
Told from the point of view of Seema's child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.
Review
"Stand back and applaud Ahmed, a writer of vast ambition, who wants nothing less than to reshape the American novel." Kamila Shamsei, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"This dazzling, heartrending debut follows two Indian sisters and their mother as they work to patch up fractures in their family... Ahmed brilliantly maps the tension between the three women with emotional acuity... This is a gem." Publishers Weekly, starred review
Review
"I've never read a novel like Nawaaz Ahmed's Radiant Fugitives, and, I kid you not, I've been waiting for this tremendous, complex, moving novel for years, but never expected to receive it... There is so much of life in this book." Anita Felicelli, Electric Literature
Review
"In heady, cultivated prose, Ahmed has penned a multifaceted, multigenerational novel that asks some of our fractured world's most probing questions... Radiant Fugitives reminds us to 'seek sustenance only in the true and truly beautiful (and) to question everything else — rituals, tradition, faith, ties.'" Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
NAWAAZ AHMED was born in Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and is the winner of several Hopwood Awards. He is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, and VCCA. He's also a Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn.