textpublishing's review
5.0
‘A major new talent.’
Observer
‘Anam’s prose is glowing and graceful.’
Guardian
‘Anam has a knack for making you care so desperately for her characters that you admire their failings as much as their strengths.’
Daily Mail
‘Anam deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment.’
New Yorker
‘Fierce and intimate, lyrical and expansive, The Bones of Grace offers what a great novel does: symphonic movements, historical landscapes that shape our private landscapes of love and life, mysteries and enchantments, the unforgettable and the unforgotten. Tahmima Anam is a mesmerizer.’
Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
‘Expansive yet intimate, weighty yet incisively funny, The Bones of Grace is a powerful examination of what it means to live in a world of collapsing boundaries and conflicting values. Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.’
Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
‘A novel of heart, brain, and muscle – the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.’
Kamila Shamsie, author of A God in Every Stone
‘Intricately structured, [The Bones of Grace] attempts to reassemble all its floating clues and end at its starting point, with its heroine reconstructing an elliptical past and searching for an elusive future…the story is speckled with anecdotes from the history of a country both young and very old.’
Guardian
‘[Anam] weaves a wealth of curious facts into a plot that itself is mesmerising, and does so with some gorgeous descriptive prose…[Her] characters are multifaceted, all have flaws, and the reader cannot help but care about their fate…A brilliant read.’
BookMooch
‘A novel of unusual, uneven beauty, heart-wrenching sadness and rare imaginative power.’
Daily Star
‘A twisting, fantastical tale of fate, chance and opportunities missed…Anam’s chief strength as a novelist is her knack for richly detailed and peopled worlds…We are taken on a meandering carpet ride through some exotic and surprising places, and there’s much to be enjoyed in that.’
Australian
‘The Bones of Grace has at its heart not war but the shattering effects of conflicted love…Zubaida's choice between love and duty is reminiscent of Anna Karenina’ Financial Times
‘A novel of heart, brain, and muscle – the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.’
Kamila Shamsie
‘Restrained and powerful.’
Observer
‘Seemingly disparate stories slowly coming together one by one, until the moment a last piece clicks sweetly into place to give us the revelation of a perfect, satisfying whole.’
Spectator
‘Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.’
Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
‘Anam has created a novel that looks honestly at cultural history, family ties, religion, honour, and secrets, it is both intimate and expansive, achingly sad yet insightfully witty. Literature at its best opens doors and with The Bones of Grace Tahmima Anam does just that.’
Hair Past a Freckle
Observer
‘Anam’s prose is glowing and graceful.’
Guardian
‘Anam has a knack for making you care so desperately for her characters that you admire their failings as much as their strengths.’
Daily Mail
‘Anam deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment.’
New Yorker
‘Fierce and intimate, lyrical and expansive, The Bones of Grace offers what a great novel does: symphonic movements, historical landscapes that shape our private landscapes of love and life, mysteries and enchantments, the unforgettable and the unforgotten. Tahmima Anam is a mesmerizer.’
Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
‘Expansive yet intimate, weighty yet incisively funny, The Bones of Grace is a powerful examination of what it means to live in a world of collapsing boundaries and conflicting values. Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.’
Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
‘A novel of heart, brain, and muscle – the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.’
Kamila Shamsie, author of A God in Every Stone
‘Intricately structured, [The Bones of Grace] attempts to reassemble all its floating clues and end at its starting point, with its heroine reconstructing an elliptical past and searching for an elusive future…the story is speckled with anecdotes from the history of a country both young and very old.’
Guardian
‘[Anam] weaves a wealth of curious facts into a plot that itself is mesmerising, and does so with some gorgeous descriptive prose…[Her] characters are multifaceted, all have flaws, and the reader cannot help but care about their fate…A brilliant read.’
BookMooch
‘A novel of unusual, uneven beauty, heart-wrenching sadness and rare imaginative power.’
Daily Star
‘A twisting, fantastical tale of fate, chance and opportunities missed…Anam’s chief strength as a novelist is her knack for richly detailed and peopled worlds…We are taken on a meandering carpet ride through some exotic and surprising places, and there’s much to be enjoyed in that.’
Australian
‘The Bones of Grace has at its heart not war but the shattering effects of conflicted love…Zubaida's choice between love and duty is reminiscent of Anna Karenina’ Financial Times
‘A novel of heart, brain, and muscle – the competing pulls of history and love are evoked here with a rare honesty, and great skill.’
Kamila Shamsie
‘Restrained and powerful.’
Observer
‘Seemingly disparate stories slowly coming together one by one, until the moment a last piece clicks sweetly into place to give us the revelation of a perfect, satisfying whole.’
Spectator
‘Few people write about identity and culture with such elegance and intelligence as Tahmima Anam.’
Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
‘Anam has created a novel that looks honestly at cultural history, family ties, religion, honour, and secrets, it is both intimate and expansive, achingly sad yet insightfully witty. Literature at its best opens doors and with The Bones of Grace Tahmima Anam does just that.’
Hair Past a Freckle
cerilouisereads's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Infertility, Infidelity, Death, and Miscarriage
annaoutloud's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed the story once I separated it from the first two books in the series, as the connection wasn't obvious for a while. Still a beautiful and heart wrenching story of Bangladesh and the complications of family.
cheryl1213's review against another edition
3.0
I'll start with two "points of order." First, this is the third in a series of books about different members (and different generations) of a Bangladeshi family. I did read the second, The Good Muslim, but didn't read the first and each book is fully capable of standing on its own. Reading the others might help provide insight into the family members at the edges of the subsequent novels, but it is by no means necessary. Second, like with the prior book, I received this from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased, honest review.
To a large extent, this book is a letter to a lost love. Zubaida is working as a researcher in anthropology when she meets Elijah at a classical concert. They have a very intense but brief period together before she leaves for a dig in Pakistan where they are hoping to uncover the "walking whale," an important link in a very unique (and apparently quite real) evolutionary chain. The dig is halted very suddenly (I won't reveal details) and Zubaida chooses to return to Bangaldesh and marry a childhood friend rather than pursue what she knows is a truer love with Elijah. A series of events at home eventually send Zubaida to a very different world where a filmmaker is trying to tell the story of shipbreakers, men (and children) who engage in the very dangerous work of tearing apart old ships for their parts.
Honestly, there's more to the plot but I hesitate to say too much. And that also goes to the heart of my problem with this novel, it simply takes on too much. I enjoyed getting to know Zubaida and could very much feel the way she is torn between true love (and career) and her past (and culture, family, and expectation). There were moments where I loved this book and the characters in it (who are all very realistically flawed), but it also just overwhelmed me.
It all combines to a 3.5 rating. Recommended to readers interested in the pull between culture/tradition and the life one is drawn to by the heart.
cjeanne99's review against another edition
1.0
I have no idea why this book came on my radar - and I'm still not sure why. For some reason I had an expectation that the book would involve more paleontology - and more understanding of the lives of the men involved with the shipbreaking. Instead - we have Zubaida - struggling to be the good daughter - living an obedient life and marrying the son of some family friends. What Zubaida really wants is to be a paleontologist - uncovering the bones of centuries old creatures - and uncovering the story of her birth mother. All the while harboring love for a young man she met while she was at Harvard.
booknerdknits's review against another edition
3.0
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway, and wasn't entirely sure what to expect. On the whole, I enjoyed the story, although I struggled at times to follow the plotline and found the writing style rambling in places (sentences of several lines long!). I would recommend this book to those who like romance and family drama, especially those set in a non-Western culture.
abookishtype's review against another edition
3.0
Zubaida has made a mess of her life. Part of it is not her fault. The larger part of the miss, however, is very much her fault. In Tahmina Anam’s The Bones of Grace, we hear Zubaida explain what really happened to her lost love, Elijah, from a point several years after everything fell apart. Along the way, we learn more about her quest for an ancestral whale fossil, the aftermath of Bangladesh’s civil war, and ship breaking in Chittagong. The book is slow to begin, but I was racing through the pages at the end of the book to see what would happen to Zubaida...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
booktwitcher23's review against another edition
4.0
Part three of a trilogy, and almost in the present, this book is set in Bangladesh, Cambridge, Massachusetts and for a brief sad while in Pakistan. It took me a little while to get into the voice of the book, but then I was hooked !
karlou's review against another edition
4.0
This is the third of Tahmima Anam's three generation trilogy set in Bangladesh, following on from A Golden Age, and The Good Muslim. It is written mostly as a narrative as Zubaida, a paleontologist, tries to explain her actions to Elijah after their affair is over. The story starts in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Elijah and Zubaida first meet before moving briefly to an archeological dig in Pakistan. Zubaida is part of a team hoping to excavate the bones of the 'walking whale', Ambulocetus natans but the dig ends in tragedy and she returns to Bangladesh where, despite her misgivings, she marries her childhood friend, Rashid. She soon realises her mistake and seeks to find some purpose to her life and some respite from her unhappy marriage through her job interviewing mistreated workers at a yard taking apart ships and ends up reunited with Elijah. Their romance though isn't destined to run smoothly, her bond, however reluctant, with Rashid, and a growing obsession with her biological roots leads to tension within all her relationships.
The form of the novel allows Anam to tell a meandering story as Zubaida hints at events and tragedies to come, and characters are introduced gradually before being fleshed out later. Anwar is a peculiarity in the book though, he is allowed to tell his own story. This interrupts the flow of the book a little but is an absorbing tale in it's own right and events later in the book clarify his story further so despite my misgivings I did find it mostly worked despite initially feeling a little jarred by its inclusion.
Zubaida herself is not always an easy character to like, the structure of the novel makes her seem self obsessed but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, as the narrative is a sort of love letter to Elijah so it's inevitable that it will be mostly inwardly focused on her thoughts and feelings. The other characters (including Mo, the most sympathetic character in the novel) are seen through Zubaida's eyes so are necessarily less rounded, we are only seeing her view of them after all.
Anam has created a novel that looks honestly at cultural history, family ties, religion, honour, and secrets, it is both intimate and expansive, achingly sad yet insightfully witty. Reading the book made me curious to learn more and I found myself looking up facts about Bangladesh's history and paleontology. Literature at its best opens doors and with The Bones of Grace Tahmima Anam does just that.
Thanks to the author and publishers for my ARC received through Netgalley.
The form of the novel allows Anam to tell a meandering story as Zubaida hints at events and tragedies to come, and characters are introduced gradually before being fleshed out later. Anwar is a peculiarity in the book though, he is allowed to tell his own story. This interrupts the flow of the book a little but is an absorbing tale in it's own right and events later in the book clarify his story further so despite my misgivings I did find it mostly worked despite initially feeling a little jarred by its inclusion.
Zubaida herself is not always an easy character to like, the structure of the novel makes her seem self obsessed but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, as the narrative is a sort of love letter to Elijah so it's inevitable that it will be mostly inwardly focused on her thoughts and feelings. The other characters (including Mo, the most sympathetic character in the novel) are seen through Zubaida's eyes so are necessarily less rounded, we are only seeing her view of them after all.
Anam has created a novel that looks honestly at cultural history, family ties, religion, honour, and secrets, it is both intimate and expansive, achingly sad yet insightfully witty. Reading the book made me curious to learn more and I found myself looking up facts about Bangladesh's history and paleontology. Literature at its best opens doors and with The Bones of Grace Tahmima Anam does just that.
Thanks to the author and publishers for my ARC received through Netgalley.
williamc's review against another edition
4.0
A meaningful and fulfilling conclusion to Anam's trilogy that would serve well as either a standalone novel or as the introduction to Aman's A Golden Age and The Good Muslim. The middle portion of the novel offers what appears a long segue, and it's unfortunate the value of that interlude is kept close until the end of the book, but this reader most enjoyed the struggle between dual worlds faced by narrator Zubaida Haque: it speaks to personal identity, cultural belonging, and to Western privilege which here feels both grossly opportunistic and understandably romanticized. An enjoyable trilogy overall, but with its modern setting, this is perhaps the most immediately rewarding of the three books. I hope there is a fourth to come.