Maya Haque is among the century's most fascinating figures: prickly, passionate, tender, non selfish, headstrong, devoted, belligerent, idealistic, naive, smart. "The Great Muslim" is Maya's story, rooted in her own devotion to nation and family and particularly to her brother, the tormented Sohail Haque.

What exactly is it about Bengali anthropologists? First we now have feted novelist Amitav Ghosh from West Bengal and today Tahmima Anam from East Bengal. Both gained doctorates in anthropology before embracing literary fiction. Each draws noticeably from the multi-ethnic Bengali culture which has created epic independence actions (in the 1857 mutiny from the British towards the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War) in addition to innovative artists (including Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray and Tareque Masud).

Anam sets her second novel in Bangladesh throughout the seventies and eighties, showing the various ways Maya and Sohail survive the war and also the ensuing Mujib dictatorship. Finishing her operate in refugee camps, Maya is the first one to go back to Dhaka in 1972. She and her mother, Rehana, possess a lengthy watch for Sohail, who finally reappears, a quiet wraith wracked through the revolutionary violence by which he was both victim and perpetrator. Gradually, remarkably, he surfaces from traumatized muteness to become charming preacher.

"The Great Muslim" brims with gripping narrative, absorbing background and Shakespearean moral conundrums. Anam's characterizations are complex and immediate her configurations are generally fresh and archetypal. "It had been a winter of return, moms waiting in your own home, planning elaborate foods using the leftover war rations, pushing their eyes towards the road, jumping in the smallest seem. Inevitably, as soon as of homecoming didn't happen in the manner they imagined.… No, it always happened when she was at the marketplace for a leg of mutton or searching for the lost set of clothes pegs within the grass, and also the boy seems, disheveled with new depths in the eyes, new sorrows etched into him, so when she saw him it might be like birthing him once again, checking he'd all his fingers and toes, wondering if he'd survive this " new world "."

Bangladesh's struggle for independence from Pakistan divides the formerly inseparable brothers and sisters after 18 many years of shared secrets, sorrows, adventures and dreams. However the wake of war distances them even more, as Sohail seeks refuge in conservative Islam and Maya practices her activism like a physician and journalist. "Your brother is turning, she told herself, turning. Soon you will not recognize him. He'd been her earliest friend, everything a brother ought to be: protective, bullying, pushing her to become better. He understood her frailties understood she tended toward the hysterical, the dogmatic. That they was angry more often than not. He pressed her against herself." Caught in the centre are their steadfast mother Rehana and Sohail's troubled boy Zaid.

The stunned Maya watches her freedom fighter brother relinquishing their mutual political and cultural hobbies. "She thought of all of the things he loved to complete.… Cricket about the shortwave. Mangoes and frozen treats. Dante and Ibsen. Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. Her voice about the harmonium. Her voice."