The Inheritors

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from Nadeem Zaman about the brilliant The Inheritors…

Shuffling the Shelves: The Inheritors by Nadeem Zaman

The Idea for The Inheritors

Spring 2021. Lockdown still in effect. I was teaching remotely, my classroom my laptop screen. One of the classes I was teaching that semester was Introduction to Literature, and among the texts I’d included The Great Gatsby. During a vibrant conversation about the book, my mind wandered. At the time I was anxious about having a writing project to work on. I had one massive manuscript that needed my attention but writing something new was a more attractive option than revising. As our Gatsby discussion went on and we talked about wealth inequality, social status, the lives of the rich and privileged, race and gender, corruption in politics and business, my drifting thoughts snagged on the idea: how about a reimagining of The Great Gatsby set in contemporary Dhaka? Everything we were discussing applied to modern-day Bangladesh. The book, as it were, was already writing itself in my head. As soon as my teaching day was over, I got to work. I sent my agent a message and he was enthusiastically on board. He wanted me to write the book and send it to him as soon as possible. Over the next three months or so, I wrote a draft of The Inheritors. I revised it during the summer and shared drafts with my agent. He called me during opening convocation of the new academic year at the end of August and told me the book had a publisher.

An extract from the start of the book…

1

I hadn’t been in Dhaka for nearly thirty years. We left Bangladesh for the US when I was thirteen, and except for a few short and dizzying visits in the first couple of years to attend weddings on my mother’s side, we’d stayed away. In that time, I lost touch with most of the family I’d grown up with, and I paid little attention to stories about relatives close or distant whenever my parents had one of their immersive moments of nostalgia.

My return happened more as a result of circumstances than being propelled by the growing desire I’d nursed for a while to write a book about the city of my birth.

Since the crash of 2008, my father had been selling off our numerous and lucrative properties back in Bangladesh. He travelled to Dhaka a couple of times a year, and had begun by offloading half of the plot of land connected to the house his father had built some fifty years before. I didn’t pay attention. I was living my own life, and trying to mend the fractures from a decision that had caused some tension with my parents. Two years earlier, I’d given in to both my mother’s appeals and my own need for steady companionship and let them arrange my marriage. The marriage didn’t last a calendar year. Harsh words flew between the families. The connection went back some three or four generations – mothers knew mothers, grandmothers were the best of friends, great-grandmothers had grown up together. Deep and complex relationships like those do not take slights impersonally.

In any event, we – my parents, and especially my mother and I – found our way back. My father was far less upset than my mother; but over time she too made her peace with it.

Last year, as my father was in the planning stage of another trip to Dhaka, this time to sell off everything that was left, a heart attack stopped him in his tracks. In his seventies now, he had to listen to his body more than he would like. His health had always been robust, but the stress he had put it through finally made a stand. Doctors forbade travel. My mother stood her ground. I happily volunteered.