Muslim Fiction

• Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a fascinating unreliable Pakistani narrator recounts his education in the US and the effect of 9/11 on the rest of his life. An easy and gripping read. My book of the year 2009!)

• Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke (Pakistani drug addict banker losing his job and love, clever plot)

• Salman Rushdie - East, West (short stories about India, cultural differences etc. Some humour, very evocative.)

• Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children (his most famous/prizewinning novel covering all of India, narrated by telepathic Saleem, born at the moment of India’s independence. Magic realism. I preferred the longer Enchantress of Florence set between the opulent Mughal empire and Marco Polo’s Italy.)

• Zadie Smith - White Teeth (multicultural Bengali/Jamaican/English London from a range of perspectives, faiths, and a good romping story set in the 2000s).

• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (shocking and page-turning story of a pair of boys’ lives under the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, the Taliban, and later in California)

• Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns (similar to the above but focusing on female characters this time)

• Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red (a murder mystery set among miniaturist artists in Ottoman Istanbul. Full of crazy narrators (a dog, a coin), truly original, won a Nobel prize)

• Monica Ali - Brick Lane (A Bangladeshi bride is brought to London speaking no English and not allowed to leave her husband’s flat.)

• Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (a sometimes funny, sometimes sad autobiographical graphic novel about growing up under the Islamic Revolution in Iran and later being a Muslim in Europe)

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel (Autobiography covering four countries, including FGM, extremism, questions of faith and immigration)

• Asne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul (fictionalised retelling of the author’s stay with a family in Kabul in their bookshop. A Norwegian bestseller)

• Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran (A literature professor holds an illegal Western Classics reading group with female students in Iran)

• Zoe Ferraris - Finding Nouf/City of Veils (Murder mysteries set in Saudi Arabia. Easy reading/page turners)

• Suzanne Joinson - The Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar (a novel about missionaries, lesbians, murder, refugees, God, love, loss set in the UK, Yemen and Central Asia. Outstanding. My book of 2016)

• Michel Faber - The Fire Gospel (not strictly about Islam, but set in Iraq, a visiting scholar discovers the fifth - very profane - gospel, causing international uproar in its retelling of the life of Jesus. Short, fiery and gripping)

• Steven Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo (three Bosnian characters tell an interweaving story about life under the siege, from different perspectives)

• Malala Yousafzai - I am Malala (Biography of the Nobel peace prize winner who was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan for wanting to go to school and is now studying at Oxford University)

• Zana Fraillon - The Bone Sparrow (A Rohingya child refugee in a camp in Australia, meets a girl who has run away from home. Won the Amnesty International YA prize)

• Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire (Brilliant, thought-provoking novel about three British children whose father was a terrorist, covering politics, jihadis, media, love, radicalisation with an absolutely gripping plot. Essential reading. My book of the year 2018!)

• Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows (A dramatic story sweeping from Nagasaki to Partition India, to 9/11 to Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Compelling and essential reading for anyone interested in 20th century horrors).

A couple of other highly acclaimed books connected to Islam which I haven’t read (yet):

• Tayeb Salih - Season of Migration to the North (Voted best book in Arabic of the century. A Sudanese man studying English in London and the devastating culture clash when he returns home)

• Randa Abdel Fattah - Ten Things I Hate About Me (Australian high school novel dealing with Islam, bullying, prejudice, love and teenage issues).

• Leila Aboulela - The Translator (Prizewinning novel about a Sudanese widow working as an academic at a British university)

• Leila Aboulela - Minaret (A privileged secular Sudanese scholar is forced by the coup to flee to London and become a maid)

• Ausma Zehanat Khan - The Unquiet Dead  (mystery set in Canada connecting to Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia)

• Ahdaf Soueif - The Map of Love (Anglo-Egyptian romance, won lots of prizes)

• Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh (billed as Sex in the City in Saudi Arabia, told through emails)

• Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (darkly comic satire based around assassination plots in Pakistan)

• Ahmed Saadawi - Frankenstein in Baghdad (horror based on retelling Frankenstein set in the Iraq War)

• Hanan Al-Shaykh - Only in London (A variety of Arab migrants arrive in London, tensions between old and new cultures, love, sexuality, freedom)

• Love Hate and Other Filters - Samira Ahmed (A 16 year old Muslim girl in an all white community wants the freedom to study film in NYC but a terrorist attack changes everything)

• Orhan Pamuk - Snow/The Black Book (novels set in Islamic Turkey. The first is about the Kurdish struggle for separatism).

• Paul Bowles - Let it Come Down (Based loosely on Macbeth, Bowles wrote as he travelled through North Africa. Each day, he incorporated something into his writing that had actually happened during the previous day's journey.)

• Tariq Ali - Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (Spain 1499. In the final days of Muslim Andalus, Ali's characters feel overwhelmed by encroaching Christian intolerance. The moment when the flowering of medieval Islamic culture shifted onto the road that leads to bin Laden, and when the west began the imperialistic, racist expansion that would converge so devastatingly with that path in the last decade.)

• Lawrence Durrell - Mount Olive (The most political of the novels in The Alexandria Quartet. But because it's Durrell, it also manages to be sexy and seedy. A British diplomat tells his career story, up to the Zionist gun-running going on while he conducts an affair with an Arab woman.)

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (key figure in the Black Lives Matter Civil Rights pursuit of the 1960).

• G Willow WIlson - Alif the Unseen (techno-fantastical novel about a hacker fighting an authoritarian regime, trying to get the girl, plus a djinn!)

• G Willow Wilson - The Butterfly Mosque (After taking an Islamic studies class, a young American woman decided to investigate the religion and moved to Cairo to aim to become a practising Muslim without sacrificing her Western identity and found an unlikely romance at the same time. Autobiographical).