Industry Reviews
' A major new talent.' * Observer *
'Anam's prose is glowing and graceful.' * Guardian *
'Anam has a knack for making you care so desperately for her characters that you admire their failings as much as their strengths.' * Daily Mail *
'The narrative shimmers with poetry. Anam seems to be a novelist not so much luxuriating in the act of writing as in total control of it, using just the right words to create her stunning story.' * Independent on The Good Muslim *
`Anam deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment.' * New Yorker *
`Fierce and intimate, lyrical and expansive, The Bones of Grace offers what a great novel does: symphonic movements, historical landscapes that shape our private landscapes of love and life, mysteries and enchantments, the unforgettable and the unforgotten. Tahmima Anam is a mesmerizer.' -- Yiyun Li * author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers *
`Expansive yet intimate, weighty yet incisively funny, The Bones of Grace is a powerful examination of what it means to live in a world of collapsing boundaries and conflicting values. Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.' * Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire *
`A novel of heart, brain, and muscle - the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.' * Kamila Shamsie, author of A God in Every Stone *
'Intricately structured, [The Bones of Grace] attempts to reassemble all its floating clues and end at its starting point, with its heroine reconstructing an elliptical past and searching for an elusive future...the story is speckled with anecdotes from the history of a country both young and very old.' * Guardian *
'[Anam] weaves a wealth of curious facts into a plot that itself is mesmerising, and does so with some gorgeous descriptive prose...[Her] characters are multifaceted, all have flaws, and the reader cannot help but care about their fate...A brilliant read.' * BookMooch *
`A novel of unusual, uneven beauty, heart-wrenching sadness and rare imaginative power.' * Daily Star *
`A twisting, fantastical tale of fate, chance and opportunities missed...Anam's chief strength as a novelist is her knack for richly detailed and peopled worlds...We are taken on a meandering carpet ride through some exotic and surprising places, and there's much to be enjoyed in that.' * Australian *
`The Bones of Grace has at its heart not war but the shattering effects of conflicted love...Zubaida's choice between love and duty is reminiscent of Anna Karenina.' * Financial Times *
`A novel of heart, brain, and muscle - the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.' * Kamila Shamsie *
`Restrained and powerful.' * Observer *
`Seemingly disparate stories slowly coming together one by one, until the moment a last piece clicks sweetly into place to give us the revelation of a perfect, satisfying whole.' * Spectator *
`Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.' -- Tash Aw
`Anam has created a novel that looks honestly at cultural history, family ties, religion, honour, and secrets, it is both intimate and expansive, achingly sad yet insightfully witty. Literature at its best opens doors and with The Bones of Grace Tahmima Anam does just that.' * Hair Past a Freckle *
