February 1, 2021
Boundary-crashing coder Asha Ray meets up with high school crush Cyrus Jones and is inspired to write a new algorithm. Soon they're married and working at a high-flying tech incubator called Utopia, but Asha worries that she might get swamped by Cyrus's growing fame. From Granta Best of Young British Novelists Anam (The Good Muslim ); with a 75,000-copy first printing.
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Starred review from May 3, 2021
Heavy lies the high-tech crown in Anam’s spectacular fourth novel (after her Bengal trilogy). Asha Ray, 30, a brilliant computer coder whose PhD project at Harvard involves the “reverse engineering of the brain,” reconnects with Cyrus Jones, a high school crush she hasn’t seen in 13 years who has become an itinerant “humanist spirit guide,” officiating weddings and baptisms for nonreligious people. She abandons her research and the two marry in an impulsive city hall wedding, then move into her parents’ house on Long Island. Asha and Cyrus find work at Utopia, a tech company whose mission is to “save humanity from the apocalypse.” There, Asha throws herself into creating an “Empathy Module” algorithm for a social networking app inspired by Cyrus’s spiritual work. The app, a “virtual parish” called WAI (We Are Infinite) becomes a global sensation, and, after Cyrus gets the credit for it, his charismatic personality turns him into a “new messiah” and threatens their marriage. A startling ending framed by a deadly, Covid-like pandemic drives the plot close to a disastrous abyss as a trend of “death ritual groups” sparked by the app causes moral and ethical dilemmas. Anam provides a piercing perspective on marital and business institutions and gender bias and cultural clashes, and weaves in rich local color as Asha grows reacquainted with her childhood home and her parents’ Muslim community. This is a powerful statement on the consequences of public achievement on private happiness. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Canongate.
May 15, 2021
A brilliant coder marries her high school crush and creates an app that accidentally turns him into the millennial messiah. After high school, Asha Ray blossomed. "I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time....I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder." She's working at a high-powered Cambridge AI lab when she attends the funeral of a high school teacher back on Long Island. There, she runs into the beautiful, long-lost Cyrus, who now creates alternative rituals based on all the spiritual traditions of the Earth. Two months later they are married, and she's left her lab to found a startup with her new husband and his wealthy best friend, Jules. WAI (We Are Infinite), the app Asha writes, leverages Cyrus' alternative-ritual concept into a social media platform. Though the lawyers they consult about incorporation suggest that the couple get a postnup, two years later Asha remains on cloud nine. "I'm going to write a marriage guide," she thinks. "I'll call it The Startup Wife: How To Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time." But as WAI scales the heights of venture capital and turns into an international obsession--users have shared 800,000 cat baptisms alone--with Cyrus as its face, any good feminist might predict a darker outcome for this story. Anam's fourth novel is very good on all the tech and millennial accoutrements, with imaginary apps for everything from consensual sex to anal hygiene and no scene complete without a glass of raspberry shrub or rosemary water. Nits: The outcome is overly signaled; feminism plays an odd role somewhere between liberation ideology and buzzkill; the front end of the pandemic crashing into the back end of the book seems unnecessary. A clever, often funny anti-romance novel set in the world of platforms, launches, engagements, and turmeric lattes.
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June 1, 2021
Dhaka-born, Harvard PhD-ed, London--domiciled Anam has won prestigious accolades for her Bengal trilogy into which she's lyrically woven Bangladeshi history with personal inspiration. She turns utterly contemporary in her newest novel, which reads rather like an elevated, fictional version of Anna Weiner's Uncanny Valley (2020). Asha has loved Cyrus since ninth grade; he disappeared without graduating. Four years into her MIT PhD, Asha reunites with Cyrus at their high-school English teacher's memorial service and they marry two months later. Together with Cyrus' best friend, Jules, the trio found WAI (pronounced "why"), as in We Are Infinite, a social-media platform that connects strangers "on the basis of what gives their life meaning." Asha is the engineering genius, Jules the cheerleading big thinker. Cyrus, initially reluctant, disdainful of capitalism, calling technology grotesque, will--surprise!--become the public essence of WAI. Amalgamating love, work, and identities without boundaries will not end well. Infused with winks to Han Kang's The Vegetarian (2016) and the Otsuchi wind phone, Anam's not-quite-love-story shrewdly exposes gender inequity, racism, homophobia, and male white privilege, achieving sharply exposing, skillfully engaging results.
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