It took me a really long time and multiple shifts between the book and the audiobook to pen this review. I'll Tell you why.
'A Place for Us' is about an Indian-Muslim family living in the US. This family of 5 has been through countless ups and downs, especially Amar. The story starts with Amar, an estranged son who returns home to attend his sister's wedding and is subjected to scornful looks from his father (who essentially has a problem with Amar).
Then the story moves on to show us the dynamics among the members of this family and the hardships and moral challenges they face from time to time. Other than that, we get to see themes like immigration, search for identity etc.

The prose shifts through multiple timelines and that is the biggest hurdle. It is extremely difficult to follow the prose and keep a track of the present and the past. The writing is engulfing, soul-stirring and poignant, but reading this book feels so exhaustive.

The book also needs the right kind of audience, as this has been written from the perspective of people living in a foreign land. The hardships and the torment faced by them can resonate well with a certain section of the society, while the others can only feel sympathy.

The book is definitely worth a read, especially because of the flawless and heartbreaking narration.

I enjoyed this book, I liked the family dynamic and learning about a Muslim family. The book twists and turns going forwards and backwards in times which I struggled to keep up with a bit in places. Also was very wordy as it revisited certain moments in their lives from multiple perspectives. It was a really informative and easy to read book. Slightly open ended conclusion though.

A heart-wrenching story of the damage family members can inflict on each other, consciously (betraying secrets is a recurrent theme) and unconsciously (typecasting a child’s personality and ability from an early age), and the difficulties of living with parental expectations. To add to these young people’s burden, there are community expectations too - the community of the family faith, in this case Islam, and the community of the adopted country, in this case the United States (and after 9/11 that community’s fear and hostility towards them).

The children in this family have a delicate path to tread to build happy lives for themselves. The two daughters succeed in this, the son does not and there lies the tragedy at the heart of this story. The narrative flips around between the different characters and their perspectives on the same events but it is not until the end that we are given any insight at all into the father’s thoughts. That was a shame for me as, once I could see where he was coming from, his own upbringing, his experience of being an immigrant and one half of an arranged marriage, his overwhelming belief in his faith (and not just its rules) I wished I’d known all this earlier. Perhaps that is the point, though, he is so reticent at showing his feelings that no-one realises how conflicted he is, they just accept (or not) his decisions as head of the family. Once he determines to change things, a note of hope is introduced, right at the end of the book, but maybe not too late for his relationship with his son.

My only real criticism of this book is that it is way too long, so much so that it almost (but not quite) loses its emotional impact. The first of the SJP picks for Hogarth and I wish them and the author every success with it. With thanks for the opportunity to read an ARC via NetGalley.

It’s Hadia’s wedding day and more than anything else she has wished for her brother Amar to show up and take part in it. She hasn’t seen him for quite some time and then he is there. However, things do not turn out so well, but they never have with Amar. Flashback to the times when the kids were still young and all five of them a family: Rafiq who left his home country in the Middle East when he was still a teenager to make a career in the US, mother Layla who came to the country when she married Rafiq, the two daughters Hadia and Huda and their younger brother Amar. Raising three kids in Muslim believe in a foreign country, handing on your convictions and traditions when they are daily endangered by a different set of believes and culture is never easy. Conflicts must arise and so they do until Amar leaves the family. But there are still things none of them knows and Hadia’s wedding might be the day to reveal some secrets.

There is no single word to describe Fatima Farheen Mirza’s novel. I was stunned, excited, angry, understanding, I felt pity for the characters, I loathed them, I could understand them and I just wondered about them. I guess there are few emotions that did not come up when reading it and certainly it never left me cold. Is there more you can expect when reading a book? I don’t think so.

There is so much in it that I hardly know where to begin: there are typical family relationships that are questioned when children grow up. We have the problem of immigrant parents who do not fully assimilate with the welcoming culture but want to hand on something from their native background which necessarily collides within the children. There is love, forbidden love and rules of how a partner is to be found. There are differences made between the daughters and the son, rivalry between the siblings and we have parents who have to question the way they interact with their children and sometimes do not know what to do at all.

It might stem from the fact that I am female, but I liked Hadia best and felt most sympathetic with her. Even though Rafiq explains that he only wanted to protect his daughters, the fact that he limited her in all respects: friends, personal freedom as a child or teenager, even her academic success wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm because the father wanted his daughter to become a mother a take care of a future husband. She had to fight so many wars and was always treated inferior solely because she was a girl, I absolutely fest sorry for her.

Rafiq never reaches the point where he can fully accept his daughters as equals and this is the point where I most detested him. He understood what he did wrong with his son, but he makes masses of excuses and justifies his parenting with his own experiences and upbringing. This is just pitiable because he is stuck in a view of the world which he could have overcome in all the years in a western society. I can follow his thoughts at the end of the novel and surely this is quite authentic, I know people in reality whose world view shares a lot of similarities and I surely would like to know how one can open their eyes and make them overcome the stubborn ideas of women being inferior and parents knowing everything best. I was actually pretty angry at the end when Rafiq finally gets a voice and can ultimately share his thoughts since there isn’t much I could agree with.

All in all, an outstanding novel which addresses so many of today’s issues and surely shouldn’t be missed.

Wow! A Place for Us is every bit as good as everyone is saying. A very slow-burning, family drama full of power and emotion. The story follows a Muslim Indian American family and explores love, family, faith, identity, culture, forgiveness, and tradition. Cannot recommend enough!

I think this is a certain person's kind of book. If you like slow burning novels about family dramas that tangle themselves through a story, then this is probably the kind of book for you. However, I really couldn't connect with any of the characters and found the story a bit boring after a while. I think my taste's just didn't quite line up with this novel.

There’s been quite a buzz about this book since it was chosen as the first to be published from SJP’s new Hogarth imprint. Which can be hard for a book, which then has to live up to its own hype – so, does this one? I’d say yes – but perhaps not in the way I might have expected.

If you come to this looking for in-your-face gorgeous writing, or technical innovations, or a brand new, never-told-before story then I think you’ll be disappointed. If you expect something deeply politicised, too, akin to Shamsie’s recent Home Fire, then this might not match your expectations. I think what Mirza does – and does so well – is <I>normalise</I> what it means to be an immigrant, Muslim family living in America today. Issues of racism and xenophobia barely raise their head though they are certainly there in the background – but Mirza’s real story, I think, is about the bonds of family, and what she articulates so well are the boundless contradictions that comprise family relations: the tensions, the unspoken connections, the shared memories, the hopes, the disappointments. It’s almost incidental that the family in this case is Muslim. Which I liked.

Rather than telling her story in a linear way, each chapter is like a closely-observed scene or scenario in its own right. They do connect up in our head so that we can follow strands through, and, for once, the ubiquitous fractured narrative is a strength rather than a weakness. There’s some imbalance towards the end when the story becomes that of Rafiq, the father, offering his retrospective view of events we’ve already lived through – especially his fraught relationship with his troubled son, Amar.

Issues of generational differences are highlighted as Layla and Rafiq’s children assimilate their religious and cultural inheritances to modern American or western values. And I like that Mirza doesn’t fall into easy stereotypes here, paying attention to the compromises that are made across generations. If anything, I would have liked more insight into Muslim values: for example, at age nine, Hadia is told that she needs to make a decision soon as to whether she will wear a hijab or not: she decides against but her decision-making process and what’s at stake with either option is skipped over when I would have been interested in understanding why she makes the decision she does and how that contrasts with her sister who chooses the other alternative..

Most of all, what makes this book so absorbing is that these feel like real people with a sense of authentic emotion between them. The family and the way we want to both belong to it and yet also assert our independence from it is, surely, a universal common denominator – and Mirza has nailed it in all its complications.
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I thought this was a really special read. The story of a family of 5. Layla and Rafiq the parents, born in India and after an arranged marriage emigrate to America. There they have three children ; daughters Haida and Huda and son Amar. A multi narrated story with multiple and non sequential flashbacks this tells a really moving tale of cultural clashes between the generations. Where the three children are born into American life and culture they have to wrestle with a traditional home life at odds with where the modern world is taking them.

A great more depth than most novels, very contemporary yet with broad commercial appeal across the ages.

Really enjoyed and will be strongly recommending

I heard so many good things about this novel that I felt compelled to read it even though it wasn't my typical genre.

It tells the story of an Indian-American-Muslim family who for the majority of the time are very traditional, arranged marriages, head scarfs etc

However what I found refreshing was the underlying story of children growing up in that world, feeling the same as we might, not fitting in, doing things that they shouldn't. Goes to show that no matter your gender, race, religion, we all face the same struggles in life.

The reason I have marked it down is because of the structure of the story. There is a lot of going back and forth between past and present but it isn't always clear just where we are on their timeline. This made it hard for me to really get into the book.

Normally a story will take me at most a couple of days to read but this took me over a week.

A good storyline and certainly different to similar genres available right now, just for me it could have been edited in a way that flowed better.

I feel like there’s only so many times you can say a book is amazing before people stop listening but yes I did happen to read a lot of books that topped my all time favourites list in within days of one another and this one has definitely earned the title of my all time favourite book. A Place For Us is about the struggles that come from living between two cultures, figuring out your identity, loss, guilt, trying to figure out where exactly you went wrong. From the start of the book you find out that Hadia is getting married and for the first time in years her family is reunited with Amar, the youngest child and only son in a Indian-American family. Throughout the book you get to see every moment leading up to the wedding through several points of view. I generally don’t like books that retell the same events from different perspectives as I find them to be repetitive and after the first few perspectives add very little to the overall story but I didn’t find that to be the case at all with this book. After reading every perspective I felt like I finally understood what happened and whose fault it was, until I got to the next one and after the very last one I was as confused about where things went wrong and whose fault it was as the characters were. I found every single character to be incredibly relatable and I’d never had as strong an emotional connection and reaction to a book ever before, the more time passes the more my love for it grows and I can’t stop thinking about it and I really recommend you pick up this book (though if you’re not a fan of character-driven books this is probably not the book for you).

This novel centres on a Muslim family in America. The focus is on pressures placed on children by parents, sibling rivalry, falling in love with the wrong person.