Praise for They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears

“[They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears] has a powerful emotional core… Anyuru’s ability to imagine a thread connecting present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment. He has written a “state of the nation” novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired.”
—Hari Kunzru, New York Times

“Anyuru underscores the reality that even parallel worlds involve global connections… Each of his characters feels real, whether experiencing friendship and delight or torture and death.”
—NPR

“It’s a rare author who has such sensitivity with explosive materials…Saskia Vogel’s translation achieves a difficult balance, nimble yet compassionate. She captures Annika’s mash-up of Western slang and Koranic Arabic, its humor often a relief, and also the more complex contemplations of the writer, poetic and touching…I came away thinking of the book as an attempt to forge a more humane means of expression, one that could surmount all our fears and failures.”
—Washington Post

“An ingeniously plotted work…Anyuru’s dystopia persuades because it is inextricable from the anxieties of his Muslim characters in contemporary Sweden, from disaffected youths who sell hash and flirt with radicalism to imams preaching forbearance in cramped basement mosques. The grammar of their faith, from its rituals of prayer to its reassurances of eternity, offers a means of orientation beyond precarious circumstances—as well as a counterpoint to the nativist equation of birthplace and belonging.”
—Harper’s Magazine

“[Anyuru]…turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope.”
—San Francisco Chronicle