The Submission

In the two years since the Twin Towers fell, Claire Harwell has reluctantly transformed from blissful wife-and-mother into an advocate for her fellow widows. In her latest and hopefully final act of service, she sits on a jury charged with selecting a fitting memorial for both those who died and those they left behind. The one submission that captures her imagination is a sweeping, tranquil garden, a place of peace well-suited to both reflection and healing; but Claire s sense of victory at successfully piloting the garden through the selection committee is short lived when the anonymous architect is revealed to be Mo (as in hammad ) Khan, an enigmatic Muslim who feels no need to speak for the one-and-a-half billion who share his faith, or to represent the beliefs of anyone but himself. As the ensuing public and media fallout rips open racial and religious wounds that have not been mended, but only mutually ignored, Claire must confront the widening gap between the woman she had always assumed herself to be and the one she now finds she has ultimately become.

About the Author :
Amy Waldman was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of The New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic and the Boston Review and is anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. This is her first novel.

Review :
Amy Waldman's THE SUBMISSION is a wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11. From the aeries of municipal government and social power to the wolfpack cynicism of the press, to the everyday lives of the most invisible of illegal immigrants and all the families that were left behind, Waldman captures a wildly diverse city wrestling with itself in the face of a shared trauma like no other in its history. With a keen and expert eye of an excellent journalist, Waldman provides telling portraits of all the drama's major players, deftly exposing their foibles and mutual; manipulations. And she has a sense of humour: the novel is punctuated with darkly comic details...[It] would seem richly satirical were it not for the fact that it so closely reflects reality. From this fertile material Waldman fashions her compelling ensemble piece...Elegantly written and tightly plotted...In these unnerving times in which Waldman has seen facts take the shape of her fiction, [this] novel, at once lucid, illuminating and entertaining is a necessary gift. There's nothing meek about Amy Waldman's high-powered debut...The Submission is a searching, cerebral novel with the pitch and pace of a thriller...It's as driven as its ambitious protagonists. Amy Waldman is an experienced journalist, and her biting sketches of cynical hacks and scripted shock-jocks ring true, as she scrutinises the link between art works and their creators. Acute and exhilarating. An absorbing, accomplished debut...Waldman [has a] feel for novelistic light and shade and an instinct for chasing down telling, surprising details...Waldman's sensitivity to the multidimensionality of the issues is matched by an observant eye for the details of social interaction...This knack for shaping scenes, along with judicious intercutting between various elements, make Waldman's novel an intelligent, satisfying read Amy Waldman writes like a possessed angel. She also has the emotional smarts to write a story about Islam in America that fearlessly lasers through all our hallucinatory politics with elegant concision. This is no dull and worthy saga; it's a literary breakthrough that reads fast and breaks your heart.