'' A NEW YEAR '' : BOOK REVIEW

A NEW YEAR by Leila Aboulela : Leila Aboulela's portrayal of a woman coming to terms with the loss of her spouse in an unfamiliar culture in her latest novel is subtle, honest and unflinching and refuses the comfort of false promises.

SUDANESE origin, Scotland based Leila Aboulela's latest novella A New Year [2025] is a compelling addition to the remarkable body of work she produced over the years - work that has garnered her accolades, including this year's PEN Pinter Prize.

Her novels include The Translator [ 1999 ], Minaret [ 2005 ], Lyrics Alley [ 2010 ]. The Kindness of Enemies [ 2015 ], Bird Summons [ 2018 ] and River Spirit [ 2023 ] along with two short story collections, Coloured Lights [ 2001 ] and Elsewhere, Home [2018].

A recurring thread in Aboulela's works is the focus on displacement, faith and the lives of Muslim women. Another prominent motif that emerges across her fiction is the exploration of the experience of loss.

In The Translator, we encounter the grief through the protagonist Sammar, in mourning for the death of her husband.

In Minaret, similarly Najwa grapples with the passing of her parents. Both women are relatively young, and the way they cope with their sadness suggests that the hope of finding alternative families or new partners is what allows them to resist the all-consuming darkness of loss.

Sammar eventually finds peace in new love, while Najwa, continues to struggle. In Aboulela's fiction, grief is often intimately tied to a displacement.

For instance in Bird Summons, the characters experience the sorrow of migration and the loss of familiar spaces.

We watch as the novel's female characters -Salma, Iman and Moni - struggle to navigate their respective terrains of grief and ultimately arrive at some semblance of peace.

Even more so in her most recent work, A New Year, grief takes centre stage, to the extent that all other narratives revolve around it. Here, the grieving figure is an older woman, Suad, a retired nurse whose husband, Sherif, suffers a heart attack at his workplace .

Suad and Sherif had been married for 46 years and have three adult children : Hamza, Nesrine and Mazen - the youngest of whom is unmarried and studying medicine at university.

The World Students Society thanks Sadia Zulfiqar.