The Bones of Grace by Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam first declared herself with the award-winning 2007 novel A Golden Age, soon followed by its equally acclaimed sequel The Good Muslim. These books explore the birth of Bangladesh, first through the eyes of Rehana Haque, then those of her daughter, Maya. Now returning with The Bones of Grace, Anam completes her trilogy with a story related by Maya’s daughter, Zubaida.

Splitting herself between her comfortable if mundane university life in the States and her comfortable if mundane fiancée in Dhaka, time for Zubaida seems almost to have stood still – until she meets Elijah, just days before leaving for a palaeontological dig in Pakistan. This brief encounter impels Zubaida to begin piecing together the fragments of her past.

Though superficially the least political of the triptych, the story poses the question of how individuals create meaning for themselves in a world where systemic exploitation is globalised and national borders increasingly hypothetical. To articulate this very modern problem, Anam utilises that very old form of the epistolary novel. Writing to Elijah, Zubaida explains that people fall in love by 'narrating themselves into the sort of connection that they will later refer to as fated,' and it's through narrating the buried traces into connection that she attempts to make a cogent whole of herself. In contrast to the protagonist’s anxieties, this complex and elegant end to the trilogy easily lives up to its forbears.