She describes women owning small businesses and supporting their families, but “we do it all behind the black”. When asked if she hopes her book will inspire women to protest she retorts, “Women are doing it themselves – they do need my book to help them”. Yet she too challenges preconceptions about her country. He learnt from a young age to not trust truth, and to appreciate how two cultures can complement each other whilst also being at loggerheads.Īlem is the first woman to have won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and, she wryly says, “the last”. He recounts learning history at school but then hearing a new side to each story from his immigrant parents. Neither are true, according to Mukherjee. We hear of it only through “rose-tinted spectacles” or in a wholly “black” hue.

In the classroom, he explains, we are not taught British colonialism’s full story. He describes an “itch” that he had to “understand a period in history”. Originally an accountant, this is the first time that he has completed more than a chapter. Mukherjee has somewhat atypical origins for a writer. Both writers concur that characters can be unruly, and take on a life of their own. “They tricked me,” she exclaims of her characters. Alem agrees, comparing writing to exploring the streets of Mecca. The story is not the writers’, but something already existing.

Mukherjee cites Stephen King’s assertion that writing is like uncovering a fossil. Set at the beginning of the British colonial period, A Rising Man explores the clash between cultures that was also the driving force behind the Bengali Renaissance.ĭespite being at different points in their careers, Alem and Mukherjee share similar writing experiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Mukherjee’s debut novel examines a similarly transitional period in Calcutta. Seasoned writer Alem explores Mecca’s ongoing modernisation in The Dove’s Necklace, what she calls an “elegy” to her home city’s rich past whilst also looking forward. Both Raja Alem and Abir Mukherjee’s new crime novels begin with a dead body, but go on to explore two very different cities.

The Dove's Necklace by Raja Alem