Seasonal Adjustments

"This was the first time that a book written by a Bangladeshi in English won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. It takes up an interesting theme – what if, when returning to your homeland, you find it changed and unfamiliar? The main character has spent almost 20 years in Australia, and when he returns to Bangladesh to visit his family he discovers that there are certain things in Bangladeshi society which bother him. The poverty that he sees really hurts him, and he finds it difficult to make his daughter understand certain norms and values. On top of all that, his marriage to a Catholic Australian woman has broken down, and his family in Bangladesh are unsupportive. He tries to cope with all these changes going on around him. It’s sometimes very funny, but also frequently sad. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Seasonal Adjustments was well received among literary circles, and although it’s quite critical of Bangladesh in many ways, there wasn’t a public backlash. I must say, though, that I was less of a fan of two his later novels, Spiral Road and Magic Seeds , which deal with the threat of terrorism in Bangladesh. I simply didn’t find either realistic, and I thought that he overplayed that threat."