A vivid coda cycles quickly through brief impressions from the perspectives of Seema’s father Tahera’s husband, who serves as right-hand man to an imam Keats, on a ship bound for Italy Bill’s dead father Obama and others. Its characters represent a number of Bay Area types, yet they are also beautifully specific. Radiant Fugitives is thinky, but it doesn’t feel constructed so much as miraculously found. Her disaffection with him, however, may grow from a new romantic interest: an energetic, idealistic Indian American fundraiser who reminds her of who she used to be. Seema’s interest in Bill, for instance, appears to be compelled by her desire for political change. What is this life we’re living? Who are we in this place together? His characters’ motivations are not fixed but fluctuate with social tides. The novel pulls American politics to its plot-the rises of Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Obama are part of the narrative-but what’s most memorable is Ahmed’s emotional discernment, his broader questions about the human condition. When she observes the makeshift family Seema has built in San Francisco, Nafeesa’s way of thanking these friends for supporting her daughter is to cook for them.
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In contrast to her daughters, Nafeesa feels uncertain about how to express herself. Seema speaks freely Tahera, less so, until she is overwhelmed, in which case she says too much. Neither is Seema immune from anxiety about Tahera’s decision to move deeper into faith.įascinatingly-and fittingly in a book that alludes so often to poetry-these three women are defined in part by their relationships to language. When Seema recalls their shared childhood with references to Keats, Tahera finds herself regretful. Certain passages are addressed directly to his grandmother, and he astutely describes Tahera’s roiling, uncomfortable feelings-“unexpected, almost a betrayal”-upon arriving in California to visit her sister and their mother after not having seen them together for almost 16 years. Ishraaq is a keen observer of his mother’s life, and of the threads and complications of family. After two decades during which she barely saw Seema because of her husband’s homophobia, Nafeesa has traveled from Chennai to San Francisco, fueled by remorse. It’s an audacious choice, but Radiant Fugitives is an audacious novel, revealing in its opening pages that Seema has died in a Bay Area emergency ward while her estranged ex-husband, Bill, waits with her ailing mother, Nafeesa. A lesbian, she is pregnant with the soon-to-be-born Ishraaq, who narrates the novel from the womb.
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Ahmed’s prose is full of close-up particulars, but the novel’s sensibility is operatic and transcendent and searching.Īhmed’s book unfolds during the Obama years Seema works as a consultant on Kamala Harris’s campaign for California attorney general. Seema becomes a political activist in San Francisco Tahera, an orthodox Muslim doctor, married with two children in Irvine, Texas.
In Nawaaz Ahmed’s debut novel, Radiant Fugitives, their words help shape the lives of two strikingly dissimilar Tamil Muslim sisters who grow up in Chennai, India. The earnest grandeur of Romantic poets such as John Keats or William Wordsworth may have fallen out of fashion, but their legacy perseveres.
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