The Family Tree

The Family Tree by Sairish Hussain
Reviewed by Mimi
📒📕📗📘📙
⁣
This is a brilliant debut. We follow the story of a Pakistani, Muslim family living up North. Amjad is left to raise his newborn daughter and 10-year-old son when his wife passes away and we follow the family through a tumultuous period of 20 years whilst the kids grow up.
This novel really beautifully examines a family going through some really tough times and explores pressures faced internally from an overbearing mother/grandmother but also from the external world and the balance of these two things is what I found thoroughly enjoyable.
To see the impact of 9/11 on a family going about their everyday lives and suddenly feeling a change in behaviour towards them was really important and powerful.
I particularly loved the daughter Zahra - with a politically engaged mind she grows up to be a self-assured and educated woman in a household she shares with her illiterate grandmother. They are so different from each other but have so much in common and I loved that relationship.

There is a LOT going on in this novel with some really gut-wrenching big life events but it is not overdone and I think the story flowed perfectly.