The National’s Book Club: when the American dream turns into a nightmare for one immigrant family

It is the book club's next chapter - a tale of tragedy set within a Middle Eastern immigrant family.

Egyptian author Rajia Hassib pens a compelling tale of cultural displacement. Courtesy The Oberports

And so the literary year begins with the news that the bestselling author Kate Atkinson has won the Costa novel prize for A God in Ruins, her almost-sequel to Life After Life that also won the award in 2013.

It was an incredible scoop even for an established name in a year that had more than its fair share of big names and big novels. Few reading this will need reminding of the list: Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, Jonathan Franzen's Purity, Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights, Jonathan Coe's Number 11, Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last and Nawal El Saadawi's opus being republished in its entirety in English. Not to mention the two stonking debuts that divided critics and either wearied or delighted readers: Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life that inched close to clinching the Booker Prize and City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg.

There were quieter voices to be heard too, of course, and one of them is The National Book Club’s next chosen title.

In the Language of Miracles by Rajia Hassib is a drama set over five days as a family mourning their son await the public memorial for their neighbour's daughter who was killed a year earlier.

The dreadful truth about the deaths is not immediately clear as Hassib masterfully teases out the agonies. It’s a personal tragedy complicated by the Al Menshawys’ status as outsiders both in the United States where the father and mother settled from Egypt before their children’s births, and also in their own culture.

The grandmother, a delightfully vivid character, constantly scolds her daughter Nagla, clucking her tongue that she does not hold to the older, more superstitious ways of her homeland.

The author also emigrated from Egypt to America and became an outsider after a wider tragedy, as Hassib explained when the novel was published in July: “Because I came to the United States shortly before 9/11, I witnessed the painful backlash that many Muslims suffered from after this heinous terrorist attack ...“I know that while most felt victimised by the hostility aimed at them in retaliation for something they neither caused nor approved of, many others started questioning if there was anything we, the peaceful Muslims, could have done to prevent such an outcome, or should now do to help stop the spread of extremism. That kind of self-examination sparked my interest in this story depicting a family that is forced to deal with tragedy in a similarly public way.”It’s Hassib’s focus on the smaller details of the immigrant experience and the cultural shift that moving from one country to another brings, that won her most plaudits.

It should also ring with truths for Abu Dhabi readers, with their myriad backgrounds. As author Monica Ali notes in her New York Times review: "Hassib is a natural, graceful writer with a keen eye for cultural difference."

Our own reviewer Malcolm Forbes found Hassib’s debut “impressive”; it “bears out Tolstoy’s famous assertion that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Do enjoy the book (or not) and tell us what you think on The National Book Club’s Facebook page.

Clare Dight is editor of The Review.