Synopsis

Zuleikha arrives in the US from Lahore, Pakistan, by marriage, having trained as a pianist without ever owning a real piano. Now she finally has one-a wedding present from her husband-but nevertheless finds it difficult to get used to her new role as a suburban middle-class housewife who has an abundance of time to play it.

Haunted by the imaginary worlds of the confiscated contraband books and movies that her father trafficked in to pay for her education and her dowry, and unable to reconcile them with the expectations of the real world of her present, she ends up as the central figure in a scandal that catapults her into the public eye and plays out in equal measures in the local news and in backroom deliberations, all fueled by winds of anti-Muslim hysteria.

The Black-Marketer’s Daughter was a finalist for the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize, and praised by the jury as a “complicated and compelling story” of our times, with two key cornerstones of the novel being the unsympathetic voice with which Mallick, almost objectively, relays catastrophic and deeply emotional events, and the unsparing eye with which he illuminates the different angles and conflicting interests at work in a complex situation. The cumulative effects, while deliberately unsettling to readers, nevertheless keeps them glued to the pages out of sheer curiosity about what will happen next.

“ A gorgeously written book with a protagonist I’ll never forget.” —Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of Good Morning, Midnight, now a major motion picture: The Midnight Sky

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About the Author

Suman Mallick received his MFA from Portland State University where he also taught in the English and Creative Writing departments. While his homes away from home include Calcutta, India and Portland, Oregon, Mallick currently resides in Texas with his beloved daughter and dog. The Black-Marketer’s Daughter is Mallick’s debut novel and was shortlisted for the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize.

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