...a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam.
Knopf
June 2006
320 pages ISBN: 0307264653 Hardcover Add to Wish List
The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a
brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted
as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old
Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words
of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's
imam.
The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father
who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at
the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the
materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the
slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New
Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance
counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's
mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant,
succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls
the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture
store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the
threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations
that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.
But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot, God is the best.
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