These Impossible Things: A Novel

by Salma El-Wardany

Overview

A Read With Jenna Book Club pick! 
 
Three best friends navigate love, sex, faith—and the one night that changes it all—in this novel that reveals “searing and poignant truths about the female experience” (Ashley Audrain, NYT bestselling author of The Push)
 
Whatever happened to the way we were?

It’s always been Malak, Kees, and Jenna against the world. Since childhood, under the watchful eyes of their family and community, these three best friends have had to navigate love, sex, faith, and womanhood alongside the expectations of being good Muslim women. But they’ve always done it together.

Malak wants the dream: for her partner, community, and faith to coexist happily, and she’ll even break her own heart to get it. Kees is in love with Harry, a white Catholic man who her parents can never know about. Jenna is always the life of the party, even though she’s plagued by an unshakable loneliness. But when their college years come to a
close, one night changes everything.

As their lives take different paths, in the wake of heartbreaks, marriages, new careers and new beginnings, Malak, Kees, and Jenna need each other more than ever. Can they forgive and find a way back to each other in time?

These Impossible Things is a moving paean to youth and female friendship—and to all the joy and messiness love holds.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538709313
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	130,376
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Salma El‑Wardany is a writer, poet, and BBC broadcaster. As a half‑Egyptian, half‑Irish woman her work focuses on telling the stories of women, especially women of color, that have for so long been ignored. She has contributed to the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa, and her writing has also appeared in Huffington Post, theMetro and she has given two TedxTalks.

Editorial Reviews

"A fun, witty, sharply observant work.... El-Wardany captures perfectly the uncertainty of life in one’s mid-20s…. readers will be thinking about Malak, Kees, and Jenna long after they close the book."—Library Journal (starred review)

"The complex characters are well observed and the prose is often moving... Fresh, witty, and insightful, this is an auspicious start."
 —Publishers Weekly

“Sparkling, incisive debut… While frothy and chatty, with witty dialogue and plenty of weddings and other gatherings that spark interactions among the characters, the book doesn't shy away from more serious issues... This novel is blessed by a light touch and evenhanded treatment of its two generations of characters.”—Kirkus

"These Impossible Things is an addictive portrait of three Muslim friends moving through a pivotal time in womanhood, caught between expectation and possibility, hungry to earn wisdom of their own. Salma El-Wardany deftly reveals searing and poignant truths about the female experience, ones so rarely confronted in fiction. What a gift to be inside this author’s mind through the pages of her beautiful and memorable writing."—Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

"This is the essential book on sisterhood that I needed to read. Beautifully written and gorgeous, Salma El-Wardany is a brilliant writer and this is a story I will never forget."—Nikita Gill, poet and author of Wild Embers

"I can't remember the last time a book consumed me like this. I truly, truly loved it. It's so beautifully written, full of warmth and love and insight; Malak, Kees and Jenna stole into my heart and stayed there. This novel captures the fierceness of female friendship better than anything I've ever read. It is a book I know I will still be thinking about for many years to come."—Beth O'Leary, international bestselling author of The Flatshare and The Road Trip

“Salacious, incisive, and unapologetically Muslim, Salma El-Wardany’s bold and brilliant story doesn’t shy away from the taboo subjects of religion and sex. These Impossible Things shows that Muslim women are multifaceted and complex despite the dearth of representation we are allowed.”—Blair Imani, activist and bestselling author of Read This to Get Smarter

“Moving, telling, glorious; girlhood giving way to something urgent and beginning. This is a bracing, tender exploration of friendship, family and faith and their gaping complications. Irresistible.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, bestselling author of Bone and The How

From the Publisher

01/01/2022

In Honey and Spice, following Babalola's buzzy debut story collection, Love in Color, young Black British woman Kiki Banjo—host of a popular student radio show and known for preaching bad-relationship avoidance—gets tangled in a fake liaison with the very guy she's been citing as big trouble. From Bays, co-creator of the Emmy Award-winning series How I Met Your Mother, 2015 New York-set The Mutual Friend features Alice Quick, mourning her mother, barely managing as a nanny, and trying to make herself sign up for the MCATs even as her tech millionaire brother experiences a religious awakening. In Blush author Brenner's latest, three sisters from a Gilt-edged family in the jewelry business are torn apart following a publicity stunt gone wrong, with one sister dying in a subsequent accident and her daughter struggling to regain traction within the family. In Coleman's Good Morning, Love, aspiring songwriter/musician Carlisa "Carli" Henton's efforts to keep her business and personal lives separate crumble when she meets rising hip-hop star Tau Anderson (50,000-copy first printing). From Egyptian-Irish BBC broadcaster El-Wardany, These Impossible Things features friends Malak, Kees, and Jenna, on the verge of adulthood as they struggle to be good Muslim women yet wanting to follow their dreams (50,000-copy first printing). In Fowler's It All Comes Down To This, three sisters—freelance journalist Beck, struggling with her marriage and a desire to write fiction; Claire, an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, recently divorced; and Sophie, leading a glamorous life she can't afford—face their mother's impending death and the fate of their beloved summer cottage on Mount Desert Island, ME. In Ho's Lucie Yi Is Not a Romantic, a follow-up to the LJ-starred Last Tang Standing, a hardworking career woman gives up on finding the right guy after her fiancé calls off their marriage and signs up for an elective co-parenting website so that she can have a baby—with unexpected consequences. In USA Today best-selling Moore's latest, Maine is not exactly Vacationland for Louisa when she visits her parents one summer with her three children, as she's dealing with an unfinished book, an absentee husband, and a father suffering from Alzheimer's, plus a young stranger in town trying to get her own life in order (100,000-copy first printing). In popular Patrick's The Messy Life of Book People, Liv Green forms a tentative friendship with the mega-best-selling author for whom she works as a housecleaner but is surprised when the author dies suddenly and in her will asks that Liv complete her final book (75,000 paperback and 10,000-copy paperback first printing). In Saint X author Schaitkin's Elsewhere, an interesting departure, Vera grows up in a small town where for generations women keep vanishing mysteriously (200,000-copy first printing). Vercher follows the Edgar-nominated, best-booked Three-Fifths with After the Lights Go Out, about a biracial MMA fighter aging out of his career and facing his father's end-stage Alzheimer's when he scores a last-minute comeback fight. Already a multi-award winner, Wolfe debuts with Last Summer on State Street, about Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens and two close-as-hugging friends—a happy threesome that expands to an uneasy foursome even as the Chicago Housing Authority prepares to tear down the high-rise in the projects where Fe Fe's family lives (50,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal

2022-03-30
El-Wardany’s sparkling, incisive debut uses the conventions of romantic comedy to explore the social and personal tensions faced by young Muslim women in contemporary Britain.

In London in the early 2000s, three lifelong friends are about to graduate from university and have to make decisions about their professional and—more importantly, from this novel’s point of view—personal lives. Jenna, a medical student from a British Palestinian family, juggles boyfriends with an eye on finally marrying an appropriate Muslim until an assault leaves her depressed and willing to settle for someone she doesn’t truly love. Malak, whose family is Egyptian and who doesn't know exactly what she wants to do with her life, loves Jacob but breaks up with him because he isn’t Muslim and she knows her family will never approve. When she moves temporarily to Egypt, she meets Ali, a British Muslim who seems perfect at first but later reveals a cruel side. Bilquis, known as Kees, whose family is Pakistani and who’s in love with Catholic Harry, makes the opposite decision: She decides to stay with him and is shunned by her family. The choices Malak and Kees make lead to their estrangement, with Jenna caught in the middle until a crisis reunites the three. While the novel’s male characters aren’t as well developed, often being either too good or evil to be believable, the three young women and their family members are complex and engaging, while the decisions they make, and often reconsider, are rooted in realistic cultural and emotional pressures. While frothy and chatty, with witty dialogue and plenty of weddings and other gatherings that spark interactions among the characters, the book doesn't shy away from more serious issues, including rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy.

This novel is blessed by a light touch and evenhanded treatment of its two generations of characters.

Kirkus Reviews