My Name is Salma Fadia Faqir

A Flavour of the Book: “When I got to our street I saw a body lying on the pavement. It was Liz splayed right opposite her front door. She smelt of cheap wine. Her navy jumper was filthy, her skirt pulled up showing most of her thighs and her white cotton pants; ladders ran up her tights and her shoes were nowhere to be seen. Her face was pale and her shut eyes had sunk in their dark sockets”.

The Authortrek View: Normally I’m a sucker for novels that feature characters with my family name (in this novel, Minister ‘Mahoney’ is an Irish Quaker who takes the protagonist Salma under his wing). Unfortunately, Fadia Faqir has structured the novel so there are continual flashbacks to the past, with often more than one flashback in a particular passage. This fractured structure is frustrating, as the reader has to do a lot of work to try to put all the pieces of the narrative together. While this technique of defamiliarisation may be intended to reflect Salma’s disjointed identity as an immigrant in the UK, it does make it more difficult for the reader to identify with her, and to feel for her as she faces her seemingly preordained fate (it seems quite wrong for the press release to label Fadia’s brother as ‘psychopathic’, as his actions are partly borne from his culture’s traditions, and Salma is not the only woman in prison with reason to fear her own family). This is a shame, as Fadia Faqir is clearly a talented writer, and My Name is Salma does successfully throw the spotlight on the inequities and the dangers faced by Muslim women in some cultures when they have a child before marriage. So, the story is good, but the manner in which Fadia Faqir has chosen to tell it is not.

You can read a resume of the book on our Amazon store below. To find out more about the author, please visit our Fadia Faqir page.

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