Indian American, Fatima Farheen Mirza, a graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former teacher of creative writing and fiction at the University of Iowa and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, is busy finishing her first book titled “A Place for Us,” which is about the reunion of an Indian American Muslim family living in California who came together to celebrate the wedding of the eldest daughter Hadia.
“After working on the novel for eight years, I could not be happier with the home it has found,” Mirza said to Vouge after “speaking with Sarah Jessica Parker and Lindsay Sagnette and seeing the care and enthusiasm they brought to their books has been deeply comforting. I’m confident in their vision for the novel and grateful that it will be brought into the world by SJP for Hogarth.”
Actress, shoe designer and producer, Sarah Jessica Parker has recently started her own publication imprint called SPJ for Hogarth, where she is the editorial director of her line of books within the Hogarth imprint of Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing Group.
“I was thunderstruck by how timely this book was and that it’s not intentionally so. She hasn’t written a treatise on the state of American geopolitical affairs, but she’s feeling something, and her family is,” Parker said.
Parker said that she is very much interested in the elements that the book had to offer such as: “voices from far away, people who are different, people from other lands that seem as distant as can be and voices and cultures that are unfamiliar.”
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Parker called Mirza’s book “a poignant portrait of a family caught between two cultures and a resonant story of faith, tradition, identity and belonging in contemporary America.”
“A Place for Us,” looks into the challenges that Haida’s family faced with issues of belonging and tradition as she has decided to marry for love and not tradition while her family members have never gotten along in the first place.
The book is yet to be published and will be set to hit book stores in 2019.
By Premji
