Broken Heart Syndrome

FROM THE BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE FORTUNE MEN

'A writer of great humanity and intelligence' KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Home Fire

'Her mother's heart is a battleground. It is Hiroshima, Mogadishu, Gaza, it is scorched earth and electric air. It is, to her, a heart that has never known rest or ease, only war.'

After a chance encounter with the man who killed her beloved brother during the Somali civil war, decades after beginning her new life in London, Amina collapses on a busy London high street, diagnosed with an episode of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy - a sudden shock or trauma - also known as broken-heart syndrome. Amina's daughter Yasmin sets out to uncover the story of her uncle's life, gradually peeling back layers of family secrets that have long lain buried.

'A literary star of her generation' OBSERVER

'Nadifa Mohamed is a big talent' NEW YORK TIMES

'With humour and lovable characters, Nadifa Mohamed celebrates the energy and resilience of London's Muslim enclaves. But this is also a ferocious novel, a protest against messy and incomplete dislocations; a feverish fretting over how parents can't be shrugged off, how divorce is not a clean break, how the countries we emigrate from still hold us back and how peace does not erase the atrocities of war' LEILA ABOULELA