Radiant Fugitives Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Nawaaz Ahmed (Author), James Fouhey (Narrator), HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books (Publisher)

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A dazzling operatic debut novel following three generations of a Muslim Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change.

Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris' attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father's long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children.

But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love - a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself. Told from the point of view of Seema's child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.

Listening Length

14 hours and 41 minutes
Author

Nawaaz Ahmed
Narrator

James Fouhey
Audible release date

November 9, 2021
Language

English
Publisher

HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
ASIN

B09D442KSF
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	14 hours and 41 minutes
Author	Nawaaz Ahmed
Narrator	James Fouhey
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	November 09, 2021
Publisher	HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B09D442KSF
Best Sellers Rank	#203,713 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #50 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #365 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books) #3,868 in Family Life Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

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3 star		21%
2 star		5%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Niraj Kumar

Excellent read..highly recommended!

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2021

Verified Purchase

The writer has managed the difficult feat of tackling grand themes while telling an intimate story of totally believable characters in all their humanity. Each of the major characters has their good and not-so-good points but they are all very real and fully human. This would have been a very good book if it stopped at portraying family dynamics. What raises it much higher is its weaving of large evergreen human dilemmas without providing easy answers. Some of the those grand themes are: conservative religious beliefs vs. sexual liberty; the nature of personal identity; impact of larger political events on individual lives and relationships; what we owe our families vs. what we owe ourselves. Best book I have read in a long time!

2 people found this helpful

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DarkNight

Amazing journey

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

I couldn't put it down. The book is stunning in it's descriptions and the story just carries you away to a far far land like a wave in the ocean.

One person found this helpful

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Richard Derus

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2021

Debut novelist Ahmed has done something special with this book. He has chosen to tell a story of rigidity and rage, of tenderness and forgiveness, and of sadness and loss from the point of view of a perinatal infant whose mother has died in trying to give him life.

That is a bold decision. And it's not a spoiler because there's no way you could possibly miss it...the author says it plain and straight on the first page. I spent the first few pages a little unsure of the wisdom of it, because it will inevitably lead to the Satanic Second Person sooner or later. (Sooner as it turns out.) But the choice, like all bold gambles, carries a certain momentum that either weighs the reader down or drags him along in its wake. I was dragged. I wasn't sure I would be. When the infant addresses his grandmother as "Grandmother," I confess I winced and even pooh-poohed the idea. I was too taken in by the way Seema, the "hasbian" (in the ugly, dismissive formulation I've heard lesbians use towards one who marries a man...why not "bisexual" I've always wondered) mother of this child, was continually struggling to find her footing in the narrative...bad choice for a narrator; Nafeesa, the terminally ill grandmother, was too cowed and rendered voiceless by her entire life's denied course; Tahera, the rigidly religious sister, was too ragey and resentful. No one else matters, their quiet places in the story don't ripple strongly enough to compete with the women and their unborn male relative. I definitely include the father in this. Poor bastard.

Back to our narrator, Ishraaq (meaning "Dawn"). He is the right choice to tell us this story because, like all infants, it's the story he inherits by his simple act of drawing breath. So my cavils were set aside, and the story progressed...familiar things happened. For example, I recognized the divide between the sisters as superficially being about their differing faith-walks but really being about the disfiguring jealousy of sisters denied the place they thought was theirs. Sibling rivalry was always going to rip their relationship to shreds. Their mother wasn't capable of standing up for herself, still less her daughters, against their forceful father and his ungovernable passions for poetry and control. Keats isn't used as a love language in their family so much as an armory of unresolvable resentments...it's their father's favorite work, and their mother was bludgeoned with it despite her love of her native Urdu and its vast, beautiful literature.

As an adult, Ishraaq's mother is an out lesbian. That goes over badly with her devout Muslim father. Mother, of course, submits her actions to her husband's control. They cut their heretical daughter out of their lives. And she, for her part, builds quite a world for herself in activist politics, while her dutiful and Muslim younger sister becomes a family physician...so no slouch in the brains department. Such a lot of anger for Big Sis from childhood...it quite naturally fuels her religious rejection of Seema for her lifestyle. In his role as narrator, Ishraaq doesn't dwell on the particulars of his mother's sex life, which I think was a good authorial call. It doesn't feel to me as though anything in the story requires us to follow the characters into their bedrooms. I noted the fact that we mostly hadn't, and then thought, well, what a great way to make use of such a narrator!

What I didn't find so believable was the way Ishraaq was sometimes omniscient, discussing things that would be impossible for him to know because the belly he was inhabiting was elsewhere. A conversation between his father and grandmother marked the first time I was jolted into awareness of the issue. It's here that the reader will stall out..."this is impossible, forget it"...or will reach the accommodation that I did: "we're assuming a consciousness is Ishraaq, not the infant flesh is Ishraaq, and the story ends when he's mere moments old." I'll get past my collywobbles re: magical narrators if there's at least a shred of a line to cling to as I suspend my disbelief. It was a close-run thing, though.

Events happen that ground us in the US of 2010. Obamacare, Kamala Harris as a candidate for Attorney General, mosque vandalism...all struck resonant chords in me. I was also taken by setting the narrative in San Francisco for the most part. I loved the atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco's fog belt, and the evocation of Dolores Park. The use of color in the book is quite elegant...a deep, unrepentant purple sky!...as is the food the characters prepare, offer, consume. There's a much-needed specificity to these moments. A great deal of the book feels less moored, grounded, because it's a flashback. The past that Ishraaq narrates, or observes I suppose, and then describes, is of necessity less vibrant than a directly shown and not told timeline would be. In many ways this choice was made when Author Ahmed chose his narrator. There really is no other practical way to tell a story from that point of view.

There are secondary characters with arcs that will shock you. There are characters whose "it's all my fault"s rang in my ears as solipsistic and self-important. There are moments of sheer blithering idiocy when decisions that should've been postponed are instead made and made badly. And that's one of the best things about the book to me. I enjoy a story with real-feeling stakes...death is a real stake, and there's more death in the book than is at first evident. The "radiant fugitives" of the title, what elicits that particular descriptive phrase, make for one of the book's set it down and say "wooow" moments.

But even the death serves its purpose. People are never more themselves than when they are around death. The selves they are, all too often, are not the selves they want to be. And it's this immense tension that gives Radiant Fugitives its narrative drive, its memorable ending, its full measure of sadness and rage, love and compassion. It's a book that forgives its characters for being less than their best selves and giving less than their all when they're called to step up. The ending will strike some as overdone, it did me, but it was most certainly an organic, honest ending to the story we started out reading. That makes the journey a good and worthwile one, and as a debut novel, one of above-average skill to create.

But, and I mean this, someone at Counterpoint needs to fix "Irvine, Texas" to read "Irving" because <I>Irvine</i>'s in California. <B>Irving</b>'s in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

rewarding read

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2021

You know from the start that things are not going to end well for Seema, the mother of the yet to be born narrator of this unusual novel. Set primarily in San Francisco, it's the story of Seema, her mother Nafeesa, and her sister Tahera, Indian Muslims from Chenai. Nafeesa and Tahera have come to support Seema in the last weeks of her pregnancy - a pregnancy she never anticipated. Seema left India after her devout father cast her out for loving women. Deeply devout Tahera, a physician, lives in Irvine, Texas with her family. Some of the most interesting sections of the novel involve Tahera and her son. Know that midway through the novel, it devolves for too long into a recitation of events of the 2008 election, which some might find interesting but frankly I remember it and would have preferred a look Tahera's life at the time. The atmospherics are wonderful- you'll smell the spices and feel the tension in the air- and the characters vivid. The ending is painful. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. It takes a bit of patience but it ultimately a rewarding read.

3 people found this helpful

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Laxmi N. Gupta

An Unsatisfactory Read

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2021

In spite of very good writing, I could not connect emotionally to this book. It is too strange, too religious and unreal. Maududi whom the author seems enamoured of is not a sympathetic figure but an Islamic ideologue, wanting to impose sharia, deprive women of their rights and in general had anti-liberal and anti-democratic views. I think, perhaps, mine is a minority view but I do not recommend this book.

4 people found this helpful

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One of My Favorite Novels of 2021

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2021

I loved this story of one estranged family trying to find their way back to one another. They all felt so real to me, and their lives playing out against key moments in our country's history elevated the story. But it was the narrator that won my heart, one character's baby, who seemed to know more about the world than we ever will. One of the best endings I've ever read and one of my favorite novels of the year.

4 people found this helpful

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Kim Lockhart

Incredibly inventive debut

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2021

This is such an unusual book, and difficult to describe in a way that does it justice. The whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. The novel is written primarily from the interior perspective of the characters. Technically, the book is written with a first person omniscient narrator, the in utero voice of the baby the main character is carrying. I sometimes forgot that, though, because of the way the author presents the painful depths of each character's internal struggles. At times, my heart soared with the allusions to poetry and the beauty of the natural world. Most of the time, though, my heart clenched for each of the characters, who clashed with each other and then expended tremendous emotional capital in reflection about the choices they'd made.

By the end of the story, there was so much friction that sparks were flying, and I had to clutch myself to keep from feeling unmoored. The author is sympathetic to the flaws of his characters, but it's clear that they're careening towards an explosive collision that no one can stop. It's breathtaking, jarring, and leaves no one unscathed, including the reader.

What's most remarkable is that this is the author's debut novel.

One person found this helpful

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Radiant Fugitives Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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