Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.

The wretched subjugation of Muslim women overshadows the immigrant adventure story.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. It seems Faqir has the same difficulty with good news that Salma has with kindness. Salma’s marriage to a gentle English educator and the birth of their son is skimmed over. Much of this is moving and poignant, if needlessly repetitious, but toward the end Faqir ( Pillars of Salt, 1997, etc.) loses her way. Tellingly, she can handle anger and rejection in her new life it is kindness that is unbearable. She imagines her brother Mahmoud stalking her, set to kill, but transcending those fears is her yearning for Layla, who she hears calling her. Salma is still crippled by shame and self-loathing. Now she works as a seamstress in Exeter, in the West Country her landlady is a volatile alcoholic. (In England, she tries to get her nipples excised.) Six years later, a Lebanese nun removed her to a convent from there, an English nun escorted her by sea to England. The baby was taken from her instantly Salma had no opportunity to suckle her. She gave birth on the prison floor to a girl she named Layla. Salma turned to her teacher, who had her put in prison so her tribe would not kill her. On learning of her pregnancy, he disowned her. In her early teens she and her boyfriend Hamdan became lovers.

She lived a simple life with her Bedouin Muslim family, herding goats. Faqir’s purpose is to show just how tenuous Salma’s life in England is, and as details of her past trickle out, we understand why. Then and now, in Jordan and England, Salma and Sally wink at us like a hologram. The Jordanian-British Faqir narrates her third novel in short takes, alternating past and present.

The woman’s name is Salma in her native land (probably Jordan). Pregnant, unmarried and sentenced to death by her family, a young Arab woman eventually escapes from the Middle East and starts over in England.

The cry of the dove by fadia faqir