The Storm

Arif Anwar's debut novel draws on the Bhola Cyclone of 1970, a disaster that killed roughly half a million people in a single night. Five interlocking love stories follow one another across five decades of Bangladeshi history. The narrative opens with Shahryar, a newly minted PhD, who is also the father of nine-year-old Anna. His visa is about to expire, forcing him to leave the United States, so he spends his final weeks with her by recounting the history of his homeland.

His account begins in a fishing village on the Bay of Bengal, where a impoverished fisherman and his wife, a Hindu woman who became a Muslim for love of him, wait for a storm of enormous scale. Other threads reach beyond the village: a Japanese fighter pilot, a British woman doctor posted to Burma during the Second World War, an Austrian-born Buddhist monk, and a wealthy couple in Calcutta who give up their comfortable life to settle in East Pakistan after the Partition of India.

The novel's shape echoes the storm itself, rising toward a sequence of revealing and emotionally charged peaks. Throughout, it examines how families love, betray, honour and sacrifice for each other. Reviewers have compared the book to Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, placing it in the same tradition of sweeping historical fiction.