My War, My Child

A powerful debut novel by an award-winning author who "offers the reader a glimpse into the lives of women who are largely ignored by society."— Meera Ekkanath Klein, author of the award-winning My Mother's Kitchen: A Novel with Recipes and Seeing Ceremony A law student at Dhaka University, Afsana's future is bright. Her greatest concern is whether or not her parents will approve of her marriage. When they do, the young bride knows she can face anything the future holds. Then war breaks out. Six years later, she encounters a ghost from her past—her first husband, presumed dead in the fighting. My War, My Child vividly and compassionately tells the story of Bengali birangona, the war heroines, whose lives were brutally torn apart by the 1971 War for Independence. Though the fight resulted in the freedom and independent nation so craved by the Bengali people, hundreds of thousands of women's lives were devastated, leaving them to scrape together the pieces and carry on as best they could—often with children and orphans forced upon them. This is a piece of history you've never heard before, an inside look at the resilience and strength of women around the world.