Contemporary Novels by Muslim Authors

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. Change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth, an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Alys Binat had sworn never to marry—until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider. Told with wry wit and colorful prose, Unmarriageable is a charming update on Jane Austen’s beloved novel and an exhilarating exploration of love, marriage, class, and sisterhood.

An illustrated book on the refugee crisis that will break your heart in under 48 pages, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed.

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the influence of fathers over sons — their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.

Ayesha lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself.

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the invented memoirs of Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring.

Ali Shigri, Pakistani Air Force pilot, is on a mission to avenge his father’s suspicious death, which the government calls a suicide. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. Intrigue and subterfuge combine with bad luck and good in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.

When 14-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher — her female teacher — she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as an overachiever and class clown. Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran — ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.

Now that Soraya Nazari has graduated from university, she thinks it’s time to get some of the life experience she feels she’s lacking, partly due to her strict upbringing—and Magnus Evans seems like the perfect way to get it. Where she’s the somewhat timid, artistic daughter of Iranian immigrants, Magnus is the quintessential British lad. What’s the harm in having some fun as she navigates her postgrad life? Moving between modern-day London and revolutionary Iran, The Mismatch is a gorgeously written coming-of-age story that follows a young woman as she finds love in a most unexpected place, and a path in life amid two different cultures.

Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of “political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir” (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism.

A young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming-of-age in this brilliant debut novel. At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single family, Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences.