My War, My Child

My War, My Child By Bharati Sen
Publication date: March 26, 2024
Buy Link: Amazon
Genres: Adult, Historical
Summary:

A law student at Dhaka University, Afsana’s future is bright. Her greatest concern is whether or not her parents will approve of her marriage. When they do, the young bride knows she can face anything the future holds.

Then war breaks out.

Six years later, she encounters a ghost from her past-her first husband, presumed dead in the fighting.

My War, My Child vividly and compassionately tells the story of Bengali birangona, the war heroines, whose lives were brutally torn apart by the 1971 War for Independence. Though the fight resulted in the freedom and independent nation so craved by the Bengali people, hundreds of thousands of women’s lives were devastated, leaving them to scrape together the pieces and carry on as best they could-often with children and orphans forced upon them.

This is a piece of history you’ve never heard before, an inside look at the resilience and strength of women around the world.

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EXCERPT:

Farzad startled when she touched his arm. Her voice had changed indeed, weaker, but still the voice that in old days—not so very old either—-was the one voice that meant the whole world to him.

For a single instant, his thoughts strayed away into the past, and the marvel of his first love came back to him.
He looked down upon the soft hand that held his arm. He stared at the fingers, held in desperation.

His heart awoke under that touch, like a sudden flash of light, bringing back happy moments. And sad.
He recalled the last look that he had seen on her face at the door when they parted, her face conveying the anxiety of uncertainty about seeing him again.

He remembered that he had turned away abruptly, that in his preoccupied state of mind, he had not spoken one soothing word to her.
Her voice now sounded like a mournful echo of his dead love.

The days when he adored her, thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the days when he lived on in the bitterness of missing her gentle love for him, could not be revived again.

And it occurred to him that he still had a moment to decide, only a brief moment now, whether to take her back or abandon her.

Author Bio:

Bharati Sen was born in Rangoon, Myanmar and spent much of her childhood growing up in Southeast Asia and West Bengal. She completed a Masters in International Relations, and discovered a passion for writing about disparities and cultural differences, particularly in women. Her debut award-winning book titled, On the Banks of River Sarayu, is a compilation of nineteen stories reflecting the lives of ordinary South Asian women within bittersweet tales. The book was awarded finalist in the 2020 International Book Awards as well as the 2020 finalist for the MiPA Midwest Book Award in the category of Short Stories. Her first novel, My War My Child, narrates the intertwined story of two war heroines during the Bangladesh War of Independence, and will be coming out in Spring of 2024.

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