"In The Light Of What We Know" Summary Of The Book: A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world--and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power. (amazon.com)
Zia Haider Rahman (Bengali: জিয়া হায়দার রহমান) is a British novelist who was born in Bangladesh and raised in the UK. His debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim. In August 2015, Rahman was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize. In 2016 he was the recipient of the inaugural International Ranald McDonald prize. Rahman is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America.