Tahmima Anam: ‘I have a complicated relationship with Bangladesh’

There’s a moment in Tahmima Anam’s latest novel when her protagonist, Zubaida, realises that she may never be as fulfilled as her parents, who lived through the war in Bangladesh. “The war was fundamental, a kind of birth not just for the country but for all the too-young people who had willed the country into being.”

The Bones of Grace is the final part of Anam’s trilogy that began in the war of independence that separated Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. Zubaida is the third generation of the Haque family chronicled: she is a young, US-educated palaeontologist who returns home to fulfil an obligation to marry her childhood sweetheart. “My parents are now, forty years later, starting to come to terms with what the war has done to them,” she reflects. “All the good things – their marriage, woven with the broken threads of what they lost; the sweetness of knowing their lives have meant something, for they are not, like so many, plagued by the pain of insignificance.”

Open the web link to read the full Guardian story:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/13/tahmima-anam-i-have-complicated-relationship-with-bangladesh-interview