Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family are Syrian Americans living in New Orleans, he and his wife Kathy (a converted Southern Baptist American) run a painting and decorating business and let a number of properties across the city. There is some discrimination but Abdulrahman, known as Zeitoun because of people's inability to pronounce his first name, is well respected for his insistence on a high level of workmanship by all his crews, and he has a strong healthy business. The couple have four beloved children and life is good.

When Hurricane Katrina comes in from the Gulf Zeitoun doesn't think much of it, many hurricanes have formed over the years only to peter out on land. Kathy is worried though and takes the children to stay with her family, but Zeitoun stays to watch over their properties and those of their friends who have left. Katrina itself is not too bad, but then the levees break. Zeitoun moves the family's belongings upstairs and as the waters rise sets out in his canoe to offer help where he can. Kathy and Zeitoun's extended family are worried, but he is far from the looting of the city centre and the hellish conditions in the Superdome. He links up with friends who have also stayed behind, feeds the local stranded dogs and keeps in contact with his family by a phone that still works in one of the local apartments.

Zeitoun is just beginning to think about leaving, food is running out and there isn't much more he can do. He has just come off the phone to his brother and is about to call his wife when there is a loud knocking at the door and a story of survival through hurricane rapidly turns into a nightmare, a unforgivable one in which Zeitoun's ethnicity is the tenuous reasoning behind his horrendous treatment by a city under martial law, in a country which is supposed to honour and revere civil liberties. 

A brave and deeply moving book, well written and dedicated. It changed my view of Islam, showing that beyond every radical in every religion there are a raft of kind hearted people attempting to follow the benevolent teachings of their creed, and who face terrible and unthinking discrimination.

The House of Djinn by Suzanne Fisher Staples

In this third book of the trilogy (Daughter of the Wind; Under the Same Stars; The House of Djinn) Fisher Staples continues to write beautifully about the lives of women in tribal Islamic society.

Shabanu lives a half life in the summer pavillion on the roof of a haveli, ten years after staging her own death to save the life of her child Mumtaz. Mumtaz is now 15 and her only relief from life with her half sister Layla who treats her as a servant, insists on being called Auntie and tormets Mumtaz as Layla's mother Amina did Shabanu, is when her cousin Jameel returns from San Francisco to spend the summer in Lahore. But then secrets begin to unravel, Jameel's beloved grandfather Baba dies and Nazir, who killed his own brother Rahim, (the tribal leader, Shabanu's husband and Mumtaz's father) moves to take control of the tribe. There is a real strength in there not being a westernised conventional happy ever after, instead, the conclusions really make you think about what it means to act as an adult and about the quality of love. A good conclusion to the series but not as heartbreaking as the first two.

Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fisher Staples

Beautifully written and packed with the sights and smells of Cholistani nomadic desert life, this is the story of Shabanu, whose name means Princess. Aged 12 she and her older sister Phulan and herself are both betrothed and this book is on one level about Shabanu growing up, but also an amazing depiction of a society and landscape completely alien to a reader in wet, cold, November Scotland, a society where women have to learn to obey and the rule is of father, brother and husband and how a girl can retain herself within those strictures.

After having fallen in love with 'Under The Same Stars', the second book in the three book series (Daughter of the Wind; Under the Same Stars; The House of Djinn) I was eager to read the prequel and I wasn't disappointed.