From the Bookshelf of La Crescent Public Library…

[close] Our La Crescent Community Read of 2024 featured the book Under the Tamarind Tree by Nigar Alam. Set in Pakistan around a decade after Partition, we meet four friends who've all fled to Karachi for safety, each of them living with trauma of their own and mostly unaware of what factors impact one another.

Just as budding romances bloom and futures seem promising, a fateful accident at a party will forever change their lives.

Told between two timelines, the reader is introduced to two of the friends some forty years later, reconnected for an unlikely reason and secrets start to be revealed. Through flashbacks leading up to the fateful event from their past, we see how all their lives were so webbed together.

Our book clubs learned so much history by reading this novel. We had wonderful discussions and readers had strong feelings about many of the characters and felt for them. We highly recommend picking it up to learn more about the generational trauma that Partition created and the nuances of the caste system along with gender and economic barriers.