> ARRIVALS

These new books take us into several neighbourhoods in the global village.

Night of Power, Anar Ali

Anar Ali’s poignant first novel concerns the Visrams, an Ismaili family in Calgary who fled Uganda 25 years before, in 1972. We meet blustery patriarch Mansoor, his deferential wife, Layla, and unhappy son, Ashif, who works at a Toronto multinational and rarely visits. These three are generationally and culturally at odds, bound together through habit and tradition. Their lives are about to be upended on the Night of Power, Lailatul Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan, when the devout Layla explains to the godless Mansoor, “Allah seals our fates for the coming year.” Prophetic words.

Mostarghia, Maya Ombasic, trans. Donald Winkler

Maya Ombasic addresses this memoir, at once tender and unsparing, to her father — irascible, contrary, brilliant. For her, he is an embodiment of culture, history, the past and the future, at once a burden and encompassing shelter. Writing this fragmentary remembrance in the second person effectively creates an intimate universe of two, though others come and go, first in Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, then safe-haven Switzerland during the Bosnian war and finally resettlement in Montreal. The title is a melding of Mostar and nostalgia, central themes of this deeply felt memoir.

ADoor in the Earth, Amy Waldman

Parveen Shamsa leaves college and her Afghan-American community in California and embarks on a pilgrimage to her homeland, her destination a remote village made famous through the memoir of a U.S. humanitarian who provided help to the local people. The lamentable conditions she discovers raise moral contradictions and unresolvable questions. Waldman reported on Afghanistan for The New York Times. Her first book, The Submission, about Muslims in the U.S. after 9/ll, won critical praise.

Refugees & Forced Migration: A Canadian Perspective; an A-Z Guide, Catherine Baillie Abidi, Shiva Nourpanah

The editors assembled19 experts to provide essays for this alphabetical guide to talking about the refugee experience — academics, human rights lawyers, refugee activists and front-line workers, all based in Atlantic Canada. This useful primer takes us from A (activism and advocacy) to Y (youth and second generation), explaining terms, raising our consciousness and providing historical context. The goal, the editors write, was to capture “the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the refugee experience.”

Take It Back, Kia Abdullah

Here’s a thoroughly modern courtroom drama involving East London’s large South Asian community, by an authorjournalist who specializes in issues involving Britain’s Muslim population. On one side of this novel, a hesaid-she-said story, is 16-year-old Jodie, a white girl with a serious facial deformity. On the other are four Muslim teens. Jodie claims the boys sexually assaulted her after a party; they insist nothing happened. Both sides appear to be telling the truth. In Jodie’s corner we meet Zara Kaleel, a Muslim lawyer who wants to help the disenfranchised.