Author of the week

Sabaa Tahir

Before she finished her latest novel, Sabaa Tahir would have said she wasn’t a crier, said David Canfield in Entertainment Weekly. But A Sky Beyond the Storm ended a remarkable journey for the 37-year-old. Thirteen years ago, she was working as a Washington Post copy editor when she conceived of a fictional epic after reading about women in Kashmir whose husbands and sons were disappeared by Indian security agents. The idea became An Ember in the Ashes, a 2015 novel that remade young-adult fantasy fiction and launched a fourbook series that put two titles on Time’s recent list of the 100 best fantasy novels of all time. Still, closing the story of Laia, who in Ember became a spy to rescue her brother from a tyrannical regime, hit Tahir hard. “The only emotion that’s come close to that is giving birth,” she says. “Metaphorically, that’s what writing a book is.”

There are compensations, said Claire Kirch in Publishers Weekly. Tahir is proud that as a Muslim woman of color, she has helped inspire a wave of new voices in fantasy fiction. And though she has continued to spin fiction out of dark stories that emerge in the real world, she has also addressed an underlying motivation. “I heard a lot from readers about how in the past four years, and particularly since the pandemic began, they struggled to find hope,” she says. Their concerns dovetailed with what she’d been striving for throughout the Ember series. “Since I was a kid,” she says, “I’ve asked myself this question: How do we hold on to hope in the midst of the suffering, pain, and struggle the world throws at us? With Sky,

I think I finally answered it.”