The Family Tree
The Family Tree by Sairish Hussain
Reviewed by Jess
📘📒📙📕
The Family Tree is a hugely emotional rollercoaster, so buckle up if you’re reading it right now!
The book is centred around Amjad, a single father of two trying to navigate his life without his life partner. Saahil, and later Zahra as she grows up, are fiercely independent, ambitious, and charismatic, but on the last day of exams, something happens in Saahil’s life that turns them upside down.
It gets heavy quickly, tackling some strong themes like addiction, guilt, revenge, and grief, and is gripping, moving, shocking, everything you would expect from an amazing dramatic novel.
On top of all of this amazing storytelling, Sairish Hussain has managed to do what everyone thought was impossible - tell a story about a British Muslim family that is real and true to life here in the UK.
No forced marriage, no running off to join camps, no bullshit about subservient women. This is us. You and me and our families. We hold down jobs and go to uni and suffer family fallouts and dramatic hospital episodes and face our flaws and fears and it’s all real life, here in one book.
Particularly I am so thankful for a story where a man going to a mosque looking for some answers to life’s questions is as normal as a man going to a church to do the same.
The cultural markers are still there; familiar to some of us, maybe new to others but it lifts the story, adds depth to the characters. This book will sincerely enrich you as a reader, educate you on what others face in this country in terms of racism and discrimination, and I hope it can go down in future as a British literary classic.
