Once part of a family of five, Beena and her father are the only survivors. A bombing in Bangladesh kills Beena’s mother and middle brother; her youngest brother died as a child years earlier after a car accident when the family was living in Iraq. As Beena completes her studies in literature in Houston, she mourns for the loss of so much of her family and worries over her stubborn, aging father. In the wake of the violence that has left Beena motherless, she marries—in part because she cares for the man, but also to avoid being set up with a Bengali businessman who works for a corporation that profits from war-time conflict. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq escalates, Beena struggles to balance caring for her father, her grief, her new marriage, while wondering where she fits into it all. Told in dual perspectives from Beena and her father over decades, The Children of this Madness captures the destabilizing impact that
geopolitical forces have on actual people. Against a backdrop of loss, migration, and an exploration about what it means to find happiness, Wahhaj’s novel is unforgettable.

A heartfelt yet clear-sighted novel about the gains and losses of immigration, both personal and
political, The Children of This Madness masterfully explores the fascinatingly different worlds in which a father and a daughter exist, and what happens when these worlds collide.

This extraordinary novel has the texture of lived life, with all its ruptures and complications.
Nothing in Wahhaj’s propulsive story has been packaged for a foreign audience, nothing feels
manipulated or forced. The Bangladesh she describes (but never romanticizes) is at once
sumptuously beautiful and, in colonialism’s wake, heartbreakingly corrupt. Rather than moving
in one direction and looking back with regret, Wahhaj’s nuanced characters are buffeted here and there by the convulsions of geopolitics and war, trying to figure out what it means to be at home in the world.

The elegant, twined narrative of THE CHILDREN OF THIS MADNESS offers the reader an intimate view of a complicated familial, and geopolitical, drama. I’ve always found fiction the best, most compassionate and honest resource for learning about the real world. Wahhaj’s novel is a wonderfully useful addition to my own education. I really enjoyed reading this; the author made a very complicated situation lucid and moving.

In The Children of This Madness, Gemini Wahhaj weaves a moving, powerful story across
generations and continents. Through the lives of a Bengali father and daughter reckoning with
their dreams and what they’ve lost, this work is an essential new addition to the Bengali
diasporic literary landscape, one that deepens our understanding of how delicate internal
struggles come head to head with seismic historic events. As inheritors of centuries-long
imperialist, colonial power struggles, the interconnected and vividly drawn relationships at the
heart of this novel reveal to us the ways in which desires for freedom and material security are
inevitably, and tragically, entangled in the machinations of war and power. We remember by
reading Wahhaj’s work that love and memory is what remains when all else disappears.

Centered around the US invasion and destruction of Iraq, The Children of This Madness shows us how the Global South enters the empire or, rather, how the empire assimilates the Global South. In clear-eyed staccato style, Gemini Wahhaj insists on a humane narrative here and elsewhere. Houston, Texas represents. But Iraq and Bangladesh are essential, reminding us that there’s a world out there larger and more connected than the time-space capsule in which imperial wars exist. A fantastic novel. Unbeholden to the market powers that normalize destruction in the name of culture.