The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel by Nafisa Haji

The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel
Nafisa Haji
ISBN 0061493856

From childhood, willful, intelligent Saira Qader broke the boundaries between her family's traditions and her desire for independence. A free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, she rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, the world her home.

Five years later, tragedy strikes, throwing Saira's life into turmoil. Now the woman who chased the world to uncover the details of other lives must confront the truths of her own. In need of understanding, she looks to the stories of those who came before—her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father. As Saira discovers the hope, pain, joy, and passion that defined their lives, she begins to face what she never wanted to admit—that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not just an intellectual preference.

Behold the Many: A Novel

Behold the Many: A Novel
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
ISBN 0312426542

Taking up her familiar themes—family, guilt, abandonment and the curses invoked by the dead on the living—Yamanaka's latest novel builds nicely on her previous, Father of the Four Passages. In 1913, sisters Anah, Aki and Leah are sent to an orphanage on the Hawaiian island of Oahu when they fall ill with tuberculosis. Their family, headed by their hard-drinking Portuguese father who abuses their Japanese mother, is already strained before their departure. Anah promises her sisters that their mother and brother, Charles, will rescue them from the orphanage, but she is wrong: Leah and Aki die. As vengeful ghosts, Anah's sisters taunt and torture her for surviving and for what Aki terms her "lie" to them. With their parents' deaths and the disappearance of Charles, Anah remains cursed even as she attempts to go on. When Anah eventually finds happiness and marries, the chorus of voices from the dead extends the curse to her children. Only many years later—following much suffering and one horrifying event—does Anah find a way to appease the ghosts and to forgive herself. A cacophony of voices both living and dead who speak a variety of Hawaiian dialects spikes the narrative, but Yamanaka's beautiful, harsh prose and thematic vision unify this intense novel. (Feb.)
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