Description
When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. But not everyone is convinced by this tepid response, many seeing the “incident” as a hate crime. Among them is Kashif Siddiqui, the son of Pakistani immigrants, who joins a group of volunteers at an Islamic Cultural Centre on a security watch during the festive Eid night, thus becoming the likely target of a bolder attack. But Kashif is pulled towards helping the Muslim community at the Centre, seeing it as a refuge in difficult times. Eid night becomes a test of friendship, family, and faith for the people in Kashif’s orbit. For Kashif, it may mean the difference between life and death.
Fiction.
Author Bio
Mariam Pirbhai is an academic and creative writer. She is the author the debut short-story collection Outside PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES (winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction, winner of the 2019 American BookFest Award for the Short Story, and ranked among CBC's top ten "must read" books of 2017). She is also the author and editor of several academic works, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific and Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature. Pirbhai is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches and specializes in postcolonial studies and creative writing. Pirbhai is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants whose arrival in Canada followed a circuitous route from England, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. She and her husband live in Waterloo, Ontario. ISOLATED INCIDENT is her first novel.
Author City: Waterloo, ON CAN