The Storm

A Novel

By: Arif Anwar

Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Soneela Nankani

Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's Summary

In the tradition of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a sweeping historical novel that seamlessly interweaves five love stories spanning 50 years of Bangladeshi history. 

Time is running out for Shahryar. His work visa has expired, and he may soon be forced out of the United States and back to his home country of Bangladesh. Clinging to the remaining weeks he has left with his young American daughter, Shar reflects upon his family's history, beginning in a village on the Bay of Bengal, where a poor fisherman, Jamir, and his wife, Honufa, prepare to face a storm of historic proportions. 

Spilling across tense, crucial moments in history, Jamir and Honufa's story intersects with other lives, like that of Ichiro, a Japanese pilot fighting in a war he does not understand; Claire, a British doctor in danger during the anticolonialist Burmese rebellions; and Rahim and Zahira, a privileged couple in Calcutta uprooted to East Pakistan by the Partition of India. 

With a narrative sweep mirroring the storm's devastating path - leading to the eye's calamitous landing - The Storm explores hope, loss, sacrifice, and the many ways in which families honor, betray, and ultimately love one another. 

©2018 Arif Anwar (P)2018 Simon & Schuster

Great historical fiction

I listened to this book so I did not have a hard copy to help me when things got complex. I actually listened twice because I knew I had missed the importance of some crucial relationships. I also spent time looking at maps of east India, East Bengal, West Bengal, Bangladesh, Burma. I needed to understand the distances. (East Bengal actually is Bangladesh.) There are characters whom you meet and have no idea of their importance until much later in the book. Hence my second reading cleared some things up. The story moves constantly among the years of 1942, 1946-7, 1970 and 2004.

While this book taught me about South Asian history, during WW2, it’s also a beautiful story of the innate goodness in some people and the lack of same in others. And since I’m 81, I actually remember the horrific loss of life when “the storm” ravaged the Bay of Bengal and took millions of lives.