Uprising: A Novel

Summary

Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Equal parts heartrending and hopeful, Uprising is an “extraordinary” (Salman Rushdie), “powerful and uncompromising” (Kamila Shamsie) literary portrait of women’s lives told from the collective voice of their children.

On a desolate, sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh, a group of children witness their mothers endure cruelty and servitude.

Bought and sold by a merciless madam they call Amma, the women have mostly accepted their fates. Yet their children imagine that they will someday escape the island, weaving fantastic tales of freedom.

When Kusum Khan, an educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and the children come to believe she has mythic powers. Soon the women’s compliance is transformed into ferocity; their defiant rebellion will upend the island and the very order of things.

A blazing drama of resistance, female power, and collective uprising by an award-winning author who “deftly weaves the personal and the political” (The New Yorker), Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.