In the Light of What We Know, Zia Haider Rahman
In the Light of What We Know, Zia Haider Rahman
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In the Light of What We Know

Author: Zia Haider Rahman

Narrator: Ralph Lister

Unabridged: 21 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/15/2014


Synopsis

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.

In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope—from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton—and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor seeks atonement, and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world—and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.


About Zia Haider Rahman

Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer. In the Light of What We Know is his first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on August 15, 2015

New authors take note : there IS a market for your plotless meandering portentous musings! Don’t despair, just because you don’t have any kind whatsoever of a story. I appreciate that there are so many 4 & 5 star reviews of this large novel that speaking ill of it seems like farting in a cathedral.......more

Goodreads review by Violet on March 07, 2016

First of all, bear with me as I’m writing this with a Christmas day hangover! In the Light of What we Know has inspired me to reread Sebald’s Austerlitz with which it shares many similarities, not least of all the weathered tone of its voice and its duality of narrators – the first person authorial......more

Goodreads review by Paul on November 06, 2022

An impressive debut novel, the sort of book that the phrases "novel of ideas", but also "flawed" and "baggy" were invented for. The central character in the novel is Zafar, and although large parts of the novel are ostensibly told by him in the first person, what we are actually reading is the unname......more

Goodreads review by Mandy on June 04, 2014

I seem to be out of step with most readers on this one. The novel has garnered an amazing number of very positive and laudatory reviews, which completely puzzled me when I read them after finishing – or rather not finishing – the book. I admit to having skipped large chunks of it, so perhaps it is u......more

Goodreads review by James on August 07, 2014

Remember how excited you were when you discovered Pynchon? Remember how proud you were when you finished The Recognitions? When you first read Ulysses or Moby-Dick with understanding? Because we've read many of the world's acclaimed works and having, through long years of reading, hammered a recepta......more