The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman, Bernadette Dunne (narrator), Blackstone Audio (publisher)

Claire Harwell hasn't settled into grief; events haven't let her. Cool, eloquent, raising two fatherless children, Claire has emerged as the most visible of the 9/11 widows who became a potent political force in the aftermath of the catastrophe. She longs for her husband, but she has found her she sits on a jury charged with selecting a fitting memorial for the victims of the attack. Of the thousands of anonymous submissions that she and her fellow jurors examine, one transfixes a garden on whose walls the names of the dead are inscribed. But when the winning envelope is opened, they find the designer is Mohammad Khan—Mo—an enigmatic Muslim-American who, it seems, feels no need to represent anyone's beliefs except his own.

When the design and its creator are leaked, a media firestorm erupts, and Claire finds herself trying to balance principles against emotions amid escalating tensions about the place of Islam in America.

A remarkably bold and ambitious debut, The Submission is peopled with journalists, activists, mourners, and bureaucrats who struggle for advantage and fight for their ideals. In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman's cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure individual lives from their own points of view. A striking portrait of a city—and a country—fractured by old hatreds and new struggles, The Submission is a major novel by an important new talent.

Audible Audio

Published September 13, 2011

About the author

Amy Waldman is the author of two novels, A Door in the Earth, which will be published August 27, 2019, and The Submission, which was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. She has received fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, Ledig House for International Writers, the MacDowell Colony, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Waldman was previously a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a reporter for the New York Times, where, as a bureau chief for South Asia, she covered Afghanistan. She lives in Brooklyn.