The Monsoon War: A Novel

by Bina Shah

Overview

In an unnamed Middle Eastern country, government leaders maintain a stranglehold over women’s lives and freedoms. But in a neglected southern province, a secret female resistance movement has been forming for years. Now, the Hamiyat are preparing for battle, as they plan a daring attack on the perpetrators of the central regime. Bina Shah’s widely acclaimed feminist dystopia Before She Sleeps described a futuristic dystopian world where technology and tyranny rob women of their freedom and reproductive rights. The Monsoon War is the story of three courageous women — a Wife, a Fighter and a Commander — and the ambitious gambit they enact in order to free their daughters from the regime’s grasp on their lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504083065
Publisher:	Delphinium Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Bina Shah is a writer of English fiction and a journalist. She is the author of five novels and two collections of short stories, including Slum Child, which was a best seller in Italy. She was a regular contributor to the International New York Times from 2015-2018, and she is a provocative and bold commentator for the international press on Pakistan’s society, culture, and women’s rights. Her most recent novel, Before She Sleeps, originally published by Delphinium in 2018, has been published in Germany, Turkey and India. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an alum of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. In 2021, she was awarded the rank of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government.

Editorial Reviews

"Betrayals, reversals, action and nail-biting suspense make for an addictive story... and the characters and their incandescent fellowship will keep you obsessed." — The Washington Post

“Listen to the voice of Bina Shah—you will hear a young, confident, compassionate new Pakistan. Her latest novel not only sparkles with wit and wisdom but is a deeply moving paean to the power of love for the author's Pakistani culture and people.” — Professor Akbar Ahmed, author, playwright, poet, and Chair of Islamic Studies at American University

From the Publisher

2023-03-28
A women’s fighting force becomes embroiled in a war to liberate their country from an oppressive patriarchal regime.

In this sequel to Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018), readers return to Mazun, a Middle Eastern country formed after a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. In the long aftermath of that “Final War”—due partly to fallout and partly to “the Virus,” a cancer mutation that killed only women—society was left with a surplus of men. Thus, the women in Mazun are forced to take multiple husbands and bear as many children as possible. Some women take refuge in the Panah, an urban underground network of companions to wealthy men, as told in Shah’s first Mazun novel. Here, Shah offers a wider view of collective resistances. There is Alia, a rural wife in a rugged mountain village who appears a dutiful member of the system but who resists by raising her daughters as boys (lest they be plucked up by “Collectors” and married away) and by serving as an Ababeel: “a secret spy and helper of the Hamiyat”—a band of female insurgents that has existed since the time of the war. Alia’s contact in the Hamiyat is Katy Azadeh, a young fighter currently being nursed back to health in Semitria, a utopian neighboring country, after an attack. Katy herself is under the command of Fatima Kara, though she soon discovers that Kara, and the entire Hamiyat, is in the hands of powers larger than she could have ever guessed. Shah moves through multiple women’s perspectives, each playing different roles as resistors, and though the story may contain familiar tropes, the result is a cinematic mashup of spy tale, geopolitical SF, and war epic.

Shah ups the action and the stakes in this second foray into a feminist dystopia.

Kirkus Reviews