Fatima Farheen Mirza on A Place for Us
The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth—and a finalist for One Book, One New York—A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging.
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?
A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.
An instant New York Times Best Seller, A Place for Us, now out in paperback, is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
Ms. Mirza will be in conversation with Charlotte Crowe. Charlotte Crowe holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She also holds an MA in English from University of Oxford, where she completed a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and Jane Ellen Harrison, the first female classicist and archaeologist in the UK. A 2017 Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she has spent the last three years at Brooklyn Public Library supporting the President of the 59-branch system and helping launch Bard at Brooklyn Public Library, the first college degree program in a public library in the country. She is working on her first novel.
Author Photo ©Jüergen Frank
The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth—and a finalist for One Book, One New York—A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging.
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?
A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.
An instant New York Times Best Seller, A Place for Us, now out in paperback, is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
Ms. Mirza will be in conversation with Charlotte Crowe. Charlotte Crowe holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She also holds an MA in English from University of Oxford, where she completed a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and Jane Ellen Harrison, the first female classicist and archaeologist in the UK. A 2017 Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she has spent the last three years at Brooklyn Public Library supporting the President of the 59-branch system and helping launch Bard at Brooklyn Public Library, the first college degree program in a public library in the country. She is working on her first novel.
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