Once a Stranger
Zoya Patel
Once a Stranger
Zoya Patel
Mum was sick. Mum was dying.
Laila wanted her to come home.
She wasn’t sure which of the two truths was more frightening.
Ayat hasn’t seen or spoken to her sister, Laila, and mother, Khadija, for six years. She has been estranged from her family since she baulked against the arranged marriage of her sister and settled into a relationship deemed haram by Indian Muslim tradition.
Living in Melbourne, with Harry, Ayat’s a different person now, living a different life. She is not the woman her mother and sister once knew - so how can she go home? But how can she not?
Once a Stranger weaves through the past and present to show the bonds and disconnects between sisters, and between a mother and daughter, as the three women grapple with the idea of where they feel most at home.
Review
Nicki Levy
Zoya Patel, award-winning writer, editor and podcaster, and author of the memoir No Country Woman, a book that discusses themes of race, religion and feminism, brings us her first work of fiction. Once a Stranger is a moving novel in which Patel continues to examine these issues in a vividly depicted narrative using ‘now’ passages alternating with ‘before’ passages of a family’s move from India to Australia, and the prejudices and challenges they face in maintaining culture and family ‘rules’.
The book opens with an email from Laila to her sister, Ayat, asking her to come home to see their dying mother. We discover that Ayat has not seen or communicated with her family for six years and has moved away from Canberra to live in Melbourne with her partner. She learns to live with the grief of separation, but continues to wonder why she still wants to be close to her mother and sister even though they’ve chosen to reject her. Ayat is deeply impacted by the estrangement and although she moves on with her life without her family, she continually questions if their bonds can ever truly be broken. What would her life have been like, if, instead of choosing the partner and life that they rejected, she had chosen her family instead?
When she receives the news about her mother, Ayat knows she has to see them. As she drives towards her family in Canberra, she asks herself what she’ll face when she gets there. Once a stranger, always a stranger? Or will she be accepted back into the family at a time of crisis? An important Australian story illustrating the universal questions of home, culture and love, in a compelling and warm-hearted way.
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