Godsend
JOHN WRAY
(Canongate, 240 PP, £14.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
“She had the sense of something massive rushing towards her, something heavenly and final, and felt serene and wide awake and filled with faith.” In John Wray’s extraordinary, sombre, fifth novel, an 18-year-old American girl converts to Islam and leaves California in early 2001 for a madrasa in Pakistan, where she has to disguise herself as a young man in order to be allowed to study the Qur’an and, in due course, fight with the mujahideen over the border in Afghanistan. Throughout, the fullness of her faith takes centre stage.
Godsend was partly inspired by Wray’s own journey to Afghanistan to research a piece for Esquire about John Walker Lindh, the Californian who fought with the Taliban before the American invasion and was captured in 2001. But the story of Aden Grace Sawyer, known in her adopted religion as Suleyman, goes beyond any received wisdom about radicalisation. Wray envelops us in Aden’s belief (his 2009 novel Lowboy entered the psyche of a schizophrenic boy in New York in a similar way).