hollow fires

Samira Ahmed

The Book: In this exciting novel inspired by real events, Safia, a student passionate about journalism, delves into a minefield, unaware of the magnitude of the abyss she is approaching.
Jawad Ali is a fourteen-year-old American boy of Iraqi descent. He is a highly intelligent inventor, successful in his studies, and distinguished among his peers. The police arrested him because of his new invention, and he became known among his classmates, as well as in the media, as "Bomb Boy." Skin color and ethnicity remain sources of apprehension in the most pluralistic countries. There, everyone is subject to the law... except those above it. And there, even if the law rules innocence, the accused remains prey to his surroundings. The authorities acquitted Jawad, but his school punished him, and his community persecuted him. When he went missing, the incident attracted no more than a few days of attention from the security and media, after which everyone turned the page. But Safia refused to do so. She wouldn't allow anyone to forget him. There was a truth she must discover, and a perpetrator she must expose, guided by her intuition and the voice of the murdered boy in her ear.

An Indian writer born in Mumbai and living in the United States, she graduated from the University of Chicago and taught high school English for seven years. She worked to establish more than 70 small high schools in New York City and fought to secure billions of dollars in additional funding for public schools equitably across New York State.

“In a novel that cleverly uses time jumps, alternating narratives (between Safia and the ghost Jawad), and sometimes includes text messages and newspaper articles, Ahmed places her story in the larger context of a racially divided world.” —The Horn Book