Uprising

Tahmima Anam has written a kind of miracle. She has taken lives of awful hardship and woven from them a fable of terrible beauty. Uprising is extraordinary -- SALMAN RUSHDIE An unflinching, violent storm of a novel, yet also full of humanity. It broadens our understanding of how literature can capture life in all its ugliness and glory - a magnificent achievement -- TASH AW An urgent, collective-voice novel . . . I loved it -- ALEX PRESTON * * Observer * * A dark, brazen fairytale with seething forests, a wicked matriarch and monsters who devour the flesh of innocent maidens. With gusto, Anam casts a spell that ignites and lights up the circuits and dynamics of exploitation, and offers a way out -- LEILA ABOULELA The politics of rich and poor across the countries of the Global South play out to powerful effect . . . Tahmima Anam's Uprising, about enslaved sex workers in climate-threatened Bangladesh * * New Statesman * * Through the lives of a handful of women trapped in a brothel, Tahmima Anam paints a kaleidoscopic picture of a part of Bengal Delta that is in the throes of cataclysmic change - economic, technological and environmental. Both devastating and inspirational, Uprising is not to be missed -- AMITAV GHOSH Powerful and uncompromising, Uprising looks into one of the darkest corners of the world and finds bright fire -- KAMILA SHAMSIE A devastatingly potent novel. Anam goes to the darkest reaches of the psyche and forges, of what she finds there, an astonishing hope - for her characters, for us all. The novel's choral narration sets a brightness against despair - the innocence of its young girls, their indomitability, and the painfully-willed sisterhood of its women, is heartbreaking, life-affirming, beautiful -- LUCY CALDWELL A fierce, bold novel that is tender towards its subjects and unsparing in its challenge to us as readers: to see the dispossessed of the world as Anam does, as fully, beautifully, heartbreakingly human -- MONICA ALI At once ferocious and beautiful, told in incantatory prose, this is a vital, unflinching and unforgettable novel. That it's about an ongoing and age-old horror makes it all the more extraordinary -- MIRZA WAHEED