Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2018
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A gut punch of a novel that asks us to consider: what do we pass on to our children? What do we owe those we love? And without roots, can you ever truly be free?
Nahid has six months left to live. Or so the doctors say. At fifty, she is no stranger to loss. But now, as she stands on the precipice of her own death - just as she has learned that her daughter Aram is pregnant with her first child - Nahid is filled with both new fury and long dormant rage. Her life back home in Iran, and living as a refugee in Sweden, has been about survival at any cost. How to actually live, she doesn't know; she has never had the ability or opportunity to learn.
Here is an extraordinary story of exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters; a story of love, guilt and dreams for a better future, vibrating with both sorrow and an unquenchable joie de vivre. With its startling honesty, dark wit, and irresistible momentum, What We Owe introduces a fierce and necessary new voice in international fiction.
Paperback Original
"Starred Review. Spare and devastating...Translated - gorgeously and simply - by Wessel, Nahid's sentences are short and thrillingly brutal, and the result is exhilarating. Hashemzadeh Bonde, unafraid of ugliness and seemingly unconcerned with likability, has produced a startling meditation on death, national identity, and motherhood. Always arresting, never sentimental; gut-wrenching, though not without hope." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Bonde demonstrates great deftness in her depiction of the turns of events both during Iran's revolution and in the struggles the refugee family faces in Sweden, but she absolutely shines in her remarkable characterizations of Nahid, Aram, and Masood. Those who turn to books to look beyond their immediate lived reality should consider this novel a must-read." - Booklist
"I read this ferocious novel in one sitting, enthralled by the rage of its narrator. Nahid confronts her own suffering with dark humor and noisy honesty, while taking aim at a patriarchal tradition that expects her to be silent." - Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
"What We Owe is not only a riveting chronicle of immigration and loss but an unsparing interrogation of history itself, both personal and political. For the dying 50-year-old Nahid, her past in revolutionary Iran and her exiled present in Sweden collide into an ongoing, at times unendurable battle for now. By turns brutal, regretful, heartbreaking, and cautiously hopeful, this novel is an instant classic." - Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin
"Crystal clear storytelling…Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde's style may be economical with short staccato sentences - often no longer than five or six words - but it contains both an eye for details and, in a remarkable way, beautiful song. This song, in both Nahid's story and in Hashemzadeh Bonde's way of writing it, is central. What We Owe is something very unusual: both emotional and precise, and Nahid's painful honestly, grief, joy, love, and fury, so evocative. The kind of novel that becomes a primer for life, one that is important to read before it is too late." - Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)
"While navigating themes like illness and impending death that are rife with the potential of misstep, [Hashemzadeh Bonde] succeeds in creating a completely unsentimental story and is faithful to Nahid's voice to such a degree that I forgot that there was a writer behind it. I got to know a person so deeply, in a way I have not before, and catch myself wanting to agree with Nahid. To say the world ought to have treated her better, that life ought to have been better. But I have gotten to know her so well that I also know that she would push my embrace away with a sneer. No matter, Nahid is indispensable to Swedish literature's cast of characters, and I am deeply grateful that Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde has given her to us." - Expressen (Sweden)
"What's most impressive about this novel is Hashemzadeh Bonde's ability to portray tensions on different levels, and how they are all connected to each other. It is the complicated relationship between Nahid and her daughter - of the same blood but with so very different social experiences. It is the individual against structure - illustrated by Nahid's memory of her sister Maryam in Iran: 'beautiful, proud, strong. Everything a woman can't be, not even in Sweden, without getting shit for it.' And it's a struggle and achievement against coincidence - or structure, again. What We Owe is a page-turner that raises existentially universal issues while at the same time contributing additional vital pieces to the jigsaw puzzle that is the world and Sweden of today." - Kulturnytt, Sveriges Radio (Sweden)
"The style is effortless and matter-of-fact, and the author has a way of giving each sentence heat and weight…Literature has a habit of simplifying lives to 'stories'. In many such stories I've read, dying people are full of gratitude over the years and experiences they've been given here on earth. Nahid is not grateful. She is full of bitterness and rage. Justified rage, I think, against Khomeini and the Islamic dictatorship in Iran, against her father's illness and her own, against the husband she loved but who hit and kicked her when she wasn't being submissive enough. Rage and bitterness are often considered harmful and consuming, especially to women. Nahid draws her strength from her rage. She burns. Until the very last breath." - Aftonbladet (Sweden)
"Hashemzadeh Bonde succeeds extremely well in capturing the nuances in the emotional mixture of anger, clarity, darkness, and grief that is implacability, and a large part of the telling lies in the style. Short, explosive sentences reveal a character who neither has time nor can afford anything but telling the truth." - Göteborgs-Posten (Sweden)
"A breathtaking journey through Iran of the past and Sweden of today. With characters that aren't always easy to like but who are impossible to let go of, [Hashemzadeh Bonde] asks relevant, difficult questions and leaves the reader rattled. Worthy of big applause." - Fönstret (Sweden)
This information about What We Owe was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde was born in Iran in 1983 and fled with her parents to Sweden as a young child. She graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics and was named one of the 50 Goldman Sachs Global Leaders. She is the founder and director of Inkludera Invest, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marginalization in society by backing social entrepreneurs who have developed pragmatic solutions to social challenges. What We Owe is her first novel to be published in the US. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and daughter.
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