Books like Kamila Shamsie

Majumdar shares Shamsie’s gift for making a political catastrophe feel terrifyingly intimate. After an impulsive social-media post, a young woman is caught in the machinery of police, press, and populist ambition. The novel moves among three voices, each pursuing an ordinary human need—security, recognition, escape—even as those pursuits become morally ruinous.

Booker-longlisted and astonishingly assured for a debut, A Burning has Home Fire’s ruthless momentum and refusal of easy innocence. It shows how a state manufactures a story about someone, then invites everyone around her to profit from believing it. Short, swift, and devastating, it leaves behind the same furious question: what is loyalty worth when survival demands betrayal?

At the heart of The Good Muslim are a brother and sister who survived the same national trauma but drew irreconcilable meanings from it. Maya returns to Bangladesh committed to secular, practical change; Sohail has embraced religious devotion. Anam makes their conflict painful because neither is merely an argument: each is a beloved, damaged person trying to build a livable moral world.

Readers who loved the Pasha siblings will recognize the anguish of family bonds strained by faith, history, and incompatible duties. Yet Anam’s sensibility is entirely her own—patient, atmospheric, and alert to the way political convictions enter kitchens, marriages, and childhood memories. It is the searching second novel in her acclaimed Bengal trilogy, and its portrait of loving someone whose choices appall you is exceptionally hard to shake.

Jones begins with a marriage full of promise and then places it under crushing pressure from an unjust state. What follows is not a simple tale of innocence wronged, but an exquisitely balanced study of obligation: what spouses owe each other, how long devotion can be demanded, and whether love can survive becoming a duty.

Like Home Fire, the novel distributes sympathy so generously that every judgment becomes unstable. Its letters give the characters an exposed, immediate intimacy, while Jones keeps the wider structures of race and punishment firmly present without letting them flatten anyone into a symbol. Winner of the Women’s Prize and embraced by an enormous readership, An American Marriage earns that devotion: it turns a public injustice into a private moral labyrinth from which no one emerges unchanged.