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Uprising
Any moment now, we would grow up, and we would become them, waking late and hungry and with a job that had no name
On a desolate, sinking island, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude.
Bought and sold by Amma, the sadistic madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have learned to accept their fate. Yet their children weave fantastic tales of escape, imagining that someday they will leave the island and enjoy a life of freedom.
When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is forcibly brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the collective complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into a ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island, their world and the very order of things.
An earth-shattering drama of resistance and female power, Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.
On a desolate, sinking island, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude.
Bought and sold by Amma, the sadistic madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have learned to accept their fate. Yet their children weave fantastic tales of escape, imagining that someday they will leave the island and enjoy a life of freedom.
When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is forcibly brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the collective complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into a ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island, their world and the very order of things.
An earth-shattering drama of resistance and female power, Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published May 21, 2026
About the author
Tahmima Anam
22 books716 followersTahmima Anam is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and anthropologist. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Granta Best Young British Novelist, and winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her work has been published in Granta, The New York Times, and The Guardian. She was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and lives in London, where she is on the board of ROLI, a music technology startup founded by her husband.
The Startup Wife (07/13/2021) is her latest novel.
The Startup Wife (07/13/2021) is her latest novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
July 25, 2026
Writing about dark subjects is an act of balance that not many writers can find, and when starting reading Uprising, I had the impression that I started the wrong book. The things happening on the page were too normal, vague, silenced, but I discovered that it was just part of Tahmima Anam's way to find that balance. Yes, this is a feminist novel, a protest novel like many reviewers find easier to say, but even more so it is a story about sex slavery / forced prostitution. Don't expect not to see the dirty realities of such a world.
Told through the voices of the children of the victims, it has that tone of a fairytale searching for a saviour to appear. And when the villain is a woman, Amma, the madam of this brothel on the isolated island, why can't the saviour also be a woman? Kusum, despite her education, finds herself sold to Amma. Even though she has a history of resistance against her government, she ends up in a world where she learns that defiance against old, abusive systems is deaf when you are alone.
This novel is inspired by a real place in a very conservative country. It makes you conscious of why and how something like this was always permitted. It all goes back to the beneficiaries. The great lesson of this novel is to go after them if you want your protest to have an impact.
Told through the voices of the children of the victims, it has that tone of a fairytale searching for a saviour to appear. And when the villain is a woman, Amma, the madam of this brothel on the isolated island, why can't the saviour also be a woman? Kusum, despite her education, finds herself sold to Amma. Even though she has a history of resistance against her government, she ends up in a world where she learns that defiance against old, abusive systems is deaf when you are alone.
This novel is inspired by a real place in a very conservative country. It makes you conscious of why and how something like this was always permitted. It all goes back to the beneficiaries. The great lesson of this novel is to go after them if you want your protest to have an impact.
June 29, 2026
I requested this book based on my love for Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age, and I am so glad I did.
Set on an island off the coast of Bangladesh near the Sundarbans, this is the story of a group of women sold into sexual slavery, mostly by their own relatives. Several of their daughters live on the island with them until the girls come of age, when they too will be forced into the same bleak life. Change arrives with Kusum, a newcomer who took part in a rebellion before being sold to Amma, the woman who runs the island's prostitution business. The women come to believe Kusum is Bon Bibi, the guardian spirit of the forest, and her defiance becomes the spark that helps them rebel.
This is an emotionally heavy novel, filled with pain, violence, and exploitation. It is also beautifully written, and a powerful story of survival, resistance, and standing up to oppression. It is a challenging read, and a memorable one.
Many thanks to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the advance reader's copy.
Set on an island off the coast of Bangladesh near the Sundarbans, this is the story of a group of women sold into sexual slavery, mostly by their own relatives. Several of their daughters live on the island with them until the girls come of age, when they too will be forced into the same bleak life. Change arrives with Kusum, a newcomer who took part in a rebellion before being sold to Amma, the woman who runs the island's prostitution business. The women come to believe Kusum is Bon Bibi, the guardian spirit of the forest, and her defiance becomes the spark that helps them rebel.
This is an emotionally heavy novel, filled with pain, violence, and exploitation. It is also beautifully written, and a powerful story of survival, resistance, and standing up to oppression. It is a challenging read, and a memorable one.
Many thanks to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the advance reader's copy.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Uprising by Tahmima Anam is the latest novel from the award winning Bangladeshi writer. This is a dark, unflinching tale whose beating heart is Kusum Khan, a young woman forcibly bought to slavery at the hands of local madam Amma. Inspired by real events from the Bangladesh island of Banishanta, this is an extremely well-written engaging tale, which despite having such darkness at its core, doesn't lose sight of the light. Kusum is a beautifully drawn character and our beacon in the dark. I was thoroughly won over by this novel, even if some of it's subject matter is difficult to comprehend - Anam has done a superb job of balancing the subject matter against the poetry of the prose, and Uprising is an excellent novel .
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
June 27, 2026
I think i was hoping for a more triumphant ending then we got, from having heard the author talk about it. It is told by a chorus of children, who imagine the protagonist as a folk tale protector but there was much more realism to the story than that would suggest in terms of plot and content but with a slightly folk tale tone that perhaps made both the horrors being described and the protest and resistance of the women feel a little bit removed. Overall, it was very readable, very moving at points, and I appreciated it a lot.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 30, 2026
A harrowing read, but so well written and important. We follow several women, enslaved by Amma who forces them into prostitution, on a small sinking island off Bangladesh. Every day cusyoners come on the boat, and every day the women fear their young daughters will be put to work by Amma. Kusum, arrived on the island recently, starts to plan their rebellion and escape.
It is a graphic and horrible book, but I think it needed to be honest in its depiction of sexual slavery, and I liked the chorus of characters and the children's voices. I want to read more by Tahmima Anam, this was a very accomplished feminist novel.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
It is a graphic and horrible book, but I think it needed to be honest in its depiction of sexual slavery, and I liked the chorus of characters and the children's voices. I want to read more by Tahmima Anam, this was a very accomplished feminist novel.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
Want to Read
July 30, 2026I love Jeanette Winterson's writing and read her Substack regularly. In her post for 28th July 2026, she included a picture of her work space and this book was laying on top of her desk. So, I added it to my too read list out of curiosity.
July 3, 2026
It shouldn’t be possible for a book covering this many heavy, painful topics to leave me unmoved, but it did.
We follow a group of children growing up in squalor on a tiny brothel island in the middle of a river in Bangladesh; the women there are kept in dept bondage, are being mistreated by the brothel madam, and to make matters worse, global warming is making the waters rise and slowly drowning the island. Only one girl who is forcibly brought to the island fights against their imprisonment and eventually leads the women in the titular uprising.
So why did it leave me unmoved? A lot of the women, including the madam, get short chapters exploring their backstories which are all horrible to a fault, but because none of the characters were differentiated from each other before or even treated as individuals, it’s hard to provoke any feeling over their stories apart from shock and revulsion. But even that became a bit stale by the time we got to the third story about a girl who had experienced rape and abuse. I can never quite define where the line between showing the world in all its ugliness and wallowing in this ugliness for shock value is, but I think this one leaned too far into it, especially because all these terrible things happen to mostly faceless, featureless characters.
The narrator is also largely impersonal, an unnamed girl and/ or a chorus of all the children on the island, so again, it’s hard to care about what happens to them individually.
It’s all just quite… didactic. If it wasn’t as graphic, this would be the type of book you’d have to read in English class.
We follow a group of children growing up in squalor on a tiny brothel island in the middle of a river in Bangladesh; the women there are kept in dept bondage, are being mistreated by the brothel madam, and to make matters worse, global warming is making the waters rise and slowly drowning the island. Only one girl who is forcibly brought to the island fights against their imprisonment and eventually leads the women in the titular uprising.
So why did it leave me unmoved? A lot of the women, including the madam, get short chapters exploring their backstories which are all horrible to a fault, but because none of the characters were differentiated from each other before or even treated as individuals, it’s hard to provoke any feeling over their stories apart from shock and revulsion. But even that became a bit stale by the time we got to the third story about a girl who had experienced rape and abuse. I can never quite define where the line between showing the world in all its ugliness and wallowing in this ugliness for shock value is, but I think this one leaned too far into it, especially because all these terrible things happen to mostly faceless, featureless characters.
The narrator is also largely impersonal, an unnamed girl and/ or a chorus of all the children on the island, so again, it’s hard to care about what happens to them individually.
It’s all just quite… didactic. If it wasn’t as graphic, this would be the type of book you’d have to read in English class.
July 13, 2026
A short book that sometimes made me clutch my pearls - it’s a difficult read and I wanted to turn away sometimes. It is unutterably grim BUT it’s a fable like story that has moments of beauty and is a story of solidarity, collectivism and female empowerment.
July 28, 2026
4.75
Wow.
Wow.
July 9, 2026
Absolutely incredible, I was hooked from the start and completely invested in the women and girls’s path to freedom from page 1. Kusum’s an inspiration and
Anam’s writing was flawless.
Anam’s writing was flawless.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I don't usually read books about the suffering of women, not just because I am too soft for it, but I approach reading as an escape from reality, and children and women trapped and abused on a secluded island are a little too close to reality. But this book is beautifully written and leaves us a powerful message. An impact that stays with us long after it is finished.
I especially loved the children as a collective and the system as the antagonist, because how can I demonize anyone at all when Anam tells us all their stories with immense grace?
I especially loved the children as a collective and the system as the antagonist, because how can I demonize anyone at all when Anam tells us all their stories with immense grace?
July 17, 2026
Books on female rage have always been my favourite, and Uprising is exactly the kind of story that reminds me why. It made my blood boil with anger, yet somehow left me filled with hope by the time I reached the final page. Tahmima Anam's writing is absolutely impeccable raw, lyrical, and deeply evocative. She captures rage, resilience, grief, and hope with such honesty that every emotion feels tangible. Despite being a relatively short novel, it carries an incredible emotional weight that lingers long after you've finished reading.
What impressed me the most was the unique narrative choice of telling the story through the voices of the island's children. Their innocence contrasts heartbreakingly with the brutal reality surrounding them, making every revelation about the women's past even more devastating. Each woman carries a different story of betrayal, survival, and loss, yet they are all connected by the same system of oppression. Instead of reducing them to victims, Anam gives each of them dignity, and a voice.
Kusum was undoubtedly the heart of the story. Her refusal to surrender, even when everything was designed to break her spirit, became the spark that ignited courage in everyone around her. Watching hope slowly spread among the women was one of the most rewarding parts of the novel. The story also subtly weaves together themes of patriarchy, exploitation, environmental vulnerability, and collective resistance without ever losing sight of its deeply human characters.
The ending left me feeling triumphant, not just for Kusum, but for every woman on that island who dared to dream of freedom again. Uprising is heartbreaking, powerful, and unforgettable. It is a story of female rage transformed into collective strength, proving that even in the darkest places, hope can become an act of rebellion.
*FAVOURITE QUOTES:*
“Wasn’t that the definition of heaven–the freedom to do whatever you wanted? Some of us said, How can it be heaven, no one cares if we live or die.”
“They didn’t care anymore that she was young and beautiful and looked like she didn’t belong there–what good was a flower if it lay dead, refusing to bloom?”
What impressed me the most was the unique narrative choice of telling the story through the voices of the island's children. Their innocence contrasts heartbreakingly with the brutal reality surrounding them, making every revelation about the women's past even more devastating. Each woman carries a different story of betrayal, survival, and loss, yet they are all connected by the same system of oppression. Instead of reducing them to victims, Anam gives each of them dignity, and a voice.
Kusum was undoubtedly the heart of the story. Her refusal to surrender, even when everything was designed to break her spirit, became the spark that ignited courage in everyone around her. Watching hope slowly spread among the women was one of the most rewarding parts of the novel. The story also subtly weaves together themes of patriarchy, exploitation, environmental vulnerability, and collective resistance without ever losing sight of its deeply human characters.
The ending left me feeling triumphant, not just for Kusum, but for every woman on that island who dared to dream of freedom again. Uprising is heartbreaking, powerful, and unforgettable. It is a story of female rage transformed into collective strength, proving that even in the darkest places, hope can become an act of rebellion.
*FAVOURITE QUOTES:*
“Wasn’t that the definition of heaven–the freedom to do whatever you wanted? Some of us said, How can it be heaven, no one cares if we live or die.”
“They didn’t care anymore that she was young and beautiful and looked like she didn’t belong there–what good was a flower if it lay dead, refusing to bloom?”
August 1, 2026
Written by anthropologist Tahmima Anam and told from the perspective of the female children of enslaved sex workers on a Bangladeshi island. The fictional island is based on a real place, Banishanta, under constant threat of rising sea level.
The mothers are sold by their families to the brothel/prison's madam Amma, who keeps them captive through debt and drugs. Little changes generation to generation, as the daughters are groomed to take the place of their mothers as soon as they reach puberty. They receive no education and have no hope for their future.
Everything changes with the arrival of Kusum, an educated young woman raised on the mainland. The children believe Kusum to be the incarnation of the forest goddess Bonbibi.
This is an extremely powerful and important book. Despite its slim size, it took me quite a while to finish it because of the difficult subject matter. But I'm very glad I did. I will never forget this story.
Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the eARC.
The mothers are sold by their families to the brothel/prison's madam Amma, who keeps them captive through debt and drugs. Little changes generation to generation, as the daughters are groomed to take the place of their mothers as soon as they reach puberty. They receive no education and have no hope for their future.
Everything changes with the arrival of Kusum, an educated young woman raised on the mainland. The children believe Kusum to be the incarnation of the forest goddess Bonbibi.
This is an extremely powerful and important book. Despite its slim size, it took me quite a while to finish it because of the difficult subject matter. But I'm very glad I did. I will never forget this story.
Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the eARC.
July 28, 2026
Primarily set on a desolate and sinking island in the Bengal Delta, Bangladesh, Uprising is a powerful and emotional story centered on hierarchy and the rights of individuals, most specifically women. With stolen and sold women used as nothing more than sex slaves, it’s a read both tragic and beautiful. As the book progresses, it becomes an anthem for joining together in protest, in hope to ensure a brighter future of freedom for one another and for the generations to come.
Having just read I Who Have Never Known Men, I found parallels in these books, with violence leading to behavioral and psychological conditioning, stigmas of age, selfless vs selfish acts and found family/community. While this book is on the shorter side, it has a lot to say. It’s definitely one I’d recommend.
Thank-you to NetGalley, Scribner and Tahmima Anam for the advanced reader copy.
Having just read I Who Have Never Known Men, I found parallels in these books, with violence leading to behavioral and psychological conditioning, stigmas of age, selfless vs selfish acts and found family/community. While this book is on the shorter side, it has a lot to say. It’s definitely one I’d recommend.
Thank-you to NetGalley, Scribner and Tahmima Anam for the advanced reader copy.
June 13, 2026
Anam offers an impressively honest depiction of the complexities of modern sexual slavery, avoiding over-simplistic narratives and demonstrating the many awful ways women are forced and/or coerced into these situations. Each character is given her own agency, story and perspective, which prevents them from ever being reduced to a single narrative.
The climate crisis backgrounding was interesting too; while never the main focus, the rising waters around the island provide an important reminder that rampant capitalist greed is destroying both individual lives and the wider environment.
Despite the incredibly harrowing subject matter, Anam still maintains a sense of hope and humanity throughout, and the final few chapters contain some fantastically written set pieces.
The climate crisis backgrounding was interesting too; while never the main focus, the rising waters around the island provide an important reminder that rampant capitalist greed is destroying both individual lives and the wider environment.
Despite the incredibly harrowing subject matter, Anam still maintains a sense of hope and humanity throughout, and the final few chapters contain some fantastically written set pieces.
July 4, 2026
Set on a small island off the coast of Bangladesh, this short and essential novel tells the story of a community of women who have been tricked, kidnapped or sold by their poverty stricken families into a life of prostitution. They face a life of unthinkable horrors, yet somehow to maintain their dignity and protect those children that are born to them through what in effect is rape.
The arrival of a young woman, Kusum Khan, gives them some hope however. Kusum speaks of revolution and encourages the women to resist and fight back.
Though rarely easy to read, this is an essential and timely novel that brings attention to the terrifying injustices happening in a country where the authorities have done little.
The arrival of a young woman, Kusum Khan, gives them some hope however. Kusum speaks of revolution and encourages the women to resist and fight back.
Though rarely easy to read, this is an essential and timely novel that brings attention to the terrifying injustices happening in a country where the authorities have done little.
June 9, 2026
Based on real events this absolutely brilliant book is, at times, difficult to read. There's violence and sexual assault and it raises some big issues about societal inequality, the patriarchy, the climate crisis and more yet is somehow very readable. Set on a brothel island in Bangladesh some of it is narrated by the children of the island, which is both tragic and heartbreaking yet it also manages to be hopeful and uplifting. Excellent book. Highly recommended.
July 12, 2026
Book club read. Based on a real life brothel island in Bangladesh, it tells the story of the women who live there and the impact of a new arrival. It is told from the perspective of the children who live there, which was quite clever as it allowed an element of detachment
This was not an easy read. At times it felt harrowing and overwhelming; I took it slow. But wow, it was incredibly impactful and such an important story. A brilliant novel.
This was not an easy read. At times it felt harrowing and overwhelming; I took it slow. But wow, it was incredibly impactful and such an important story. A brilliant novel.
July 26, 2026
Whilst not an easy read, this is a compulsive page turner that delves into some dark places, yet finishes with hope amongst the depravity.
A tale of the feminine fighting back against the patriarchy and abuse embedded in Bangladeshi society and the world.
A tale of the feminine fighting back against the patriarchy and abuse embedded in Bangladeshi society and the world.
June 16, 2026
Read it in one day. One of those stories that is simple in the way it’s told yet nothing about it is simple. It’s heart breaking but written so well that you are left in awe. Although it should come with a trigger warning.
June 22, 2026
Really loved this - sparse, unyielding
July 13, 2026
A book of strength and resilience from women in the worst of conditions. Full of fight and compassion. I loved the voice of the children and their yearning to learn. There were just no good men which I guess reflects reality for these women. A gripping read.
July 21, 2026
What a great thought provoking book. Read it in a few sittings.
Will stay with me for a while.
Will stay with me for a while.
May 26, 2026
absolutely stunning, everyone in the world should read this at least once!!!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
She learned that when the University girls had marched, they had not just been protesting the Dictator, but the whole world. She learned that it was possible for a person to direct themselves at a very specific thing–the students and their jobs, for instance–and also at all the many things that stood in their way. Kusum wondered if she, too, could protest. If she could protest not only her presence here, on the island–but all the things that had brought her here. The man who had lied to her, the boats that contained the men who came to the island, the jobs that made the men angry, the hunger that drove everyone to do the ugly things they did, the need that had driven her parents to dream things for her, the factories that burned the coal that fuelled the brick ovens that clouded the skies that heated the air that melted the mountains that swelled the river that ate the shore and made the island a little bit smaller, a little bit poorer, every year. Was it within her to fight against all of those things? Didn’t the fights only belong in the city, in the mouths of the students? Didn’t the fights need those very streets, those very bodies and minds that had gone to school, that had grown up expecting things? Could anyone, anywhere, fight against the way things were–even Kusum, stolen from her life and everything that had been possible, her son denied his mother’s milk and eating the rice of another woman? Was it possible that Kusum could bring the fight here, to the island?
Finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize
(which was the day after I read the book and which I fully expected as this is an excellent fit).
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer. Her 2007 Debut “A Golden Age”, set in the Bangladeshi War of Independence was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and 15 years picked as the 2007 representative on the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Reading list (just to give an idea of the calibre/prestige of that selection – other 2000s books included “White Teeth”, “Life of Pi”, “Small Island”, “Half A Yellow Sun” and “Wolf Hall”).
Her first three novels (which included “The Good Muslim” published in 2011 (and set in the mid 80s) and “The Bones of Grace” published in 2016) were part of a hard-hitting historical Bengal-trilogy and also saw her included on the 2013 Decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
Her fourth – “Start Up Wife” a light satire of the Tech industry (which she knows well from being on the Board of her husband’s tech firm) was something of a tonal departure – but perhaps less of a thematic one as the author at the time said “I’ve always been interested in women finding their voices, inhabiting their power, and taking charge of their lives, and this is a thread that runs through all my novels”
And that theme serves well as an introduction for this otherwise very different heavy-hitting novel – set on a fictionalised version of the real-life “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh – described in the opening chapter by the chorus of children who narrate most of the novel – as an island “at the [Southern] end of the county, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, on its eastern side opposite a village (although with a psychological/exclusionary cultural distance much greater than the geographic one) and its west a small jetty for “customers” of their mothers to disembark. The Island itself is growing smaller and poorer due to sea level rise.
There is only limited naiveite in the children’s views – they know the customers pay their mothers for sex, they know their mothers are effectively in servitude (and economic debt) to Amma – the madam of the Island, they know that the women’s beliefs that either their customers or their long-missed families will one day rescue them fly in the face of reality. What they do believe in is the legend of the forest spirit of Bon Bibi – who they believe may one day rescue them from a fate their mothers are resigned to – partly due they know to the drugs Amma supplies them - and which they know is otherwise their terrible destiny too as they approach puberty.
When a particularly bad flood threatens Amma’s economical system she sends for a new girl – Kusum – and things for her and for the Island are changed inexorably as Kusum, after initially resisting her fate, brings her City knowledge of protest (from anti-dictator marches) to the Island and, after suffering trauma and disillusionment of her own leads the women into first their own sex-strike, then an attempt to own their own bodies (even if in a different form of online sex-work) and finally in a dirty protest in which they play on the prejudice of them being soiled and spoiled to literally repel those hoping to overturn their uprising.
The author through Kusum links the women (and children’s) sexually-trafficked predicament to a wider theme of both: injustice and sexual oppression – far from being the victims of just Amma the women come to realise that their sexually-subjugated status is sanctioned by both wider society and officialdom, and later even Kusum is forced to confront the way in which they are the deliberately sacrificed victims of a society mired in oppression and social shaming; climate change – with the depredations and degradation of the women being mirrored in and magnified by that of their environment.
The writing in the novel is uncompromising and incendiary – explicit in language and sexual references, the children again only too aware of their mother’s frankness. And the ending too is suitably stirring and uplifting for this memorable novel of poverty, patriarchy and protest.
My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley
July 17, 2026
I picked this up expecting another instalment of the Bangladesh that Tahmima Anam has spent three novels excavating, and got something closer to a fever dream crossed with reportage. The story is set on a small island in the Sundarbans where generations of women have been trapped in sex work under the watch of the formidable Amma. Into this closed world comes Kusum, herself a victim, radicalised not on the island but on the streets of Dhaka, where she had marched and sung in a real, recent uprising before a bullet took her sister instead of her. The dictator who flees the country by helicopter while students bleed in the street isn't invented. Anyone who followed last year's uprising in Dhaka will recognise the shape of it exactly. Anam grafts that history directly onto the invented horror of the island and lets the seam show on purpose, so that what follows reads less like historical fiction than like a country's present tense, carried by someone who has already learned what it costs to demand something from the world.
What follows is less a conventional revolution than an experiment in reimagining society. The women refuse men, educate their children, build a communal way of living and, through technology, discover an unexpected route to economic independence. It is an audacious premise that somehow never loses its emotional truth.
Much of the story is narrated by the children of the island, speaking as a chorus rather than as individuals. At first I found this disorientating, but gradually I realised how powerful the technique is, a device that could easily have been a gimmick and instead becomes the book's whole argument, that a life sold in pieces still adds up to a self, that even a chorus has a memory. These children have grown up without conventional families or individual identities, so their shared narration becomes a statement in itself. They are witnesses to history, but they are also its inheritance. Anam borrows from the Bon Bibi legend the way Rushdie borrows from Islamic cosmology or Okri from Yoruba spirit-worlds, not as decoration but as the only vocabulary available to children raised without one. and through them, innocence sits uneasily beside knowledge, creating moments that are heartbreaking precisely because they are told without sentimentality.
The oppression in the story isn't simplified. Amma is neither monster nor martyr. She is a woman shaped by violence who perpetuates the very system that destroyed her. Kusum, meanwhile, is an inspiring figure, but she is never portrayed as infallible. Her idealism is constantly tested by human frailty, jealousy, fear and trauma. The book understands that liberation is never simply about removing an oppressor. It is about transforming people who have lived so long within oppression that freedom itself becomes difficult to recognise.
The book contains scenes that are profoundly disturbing, exposing the entitlement that underpins sexual violence. When the women withdraw their labour and reclaim their autonomy, the men experience it not simply as rejection but as theft. Their response reveals how deeply power has been mistaken for a right. These scenes are difficult to read, yet they are central to the novel's argument about patriarchy and the limits of male possession.
If I have one reservation, it is that the novel sometimes leans so heavily into allegory that individual characters beyond Kusum and Amma can feel more symbolic than fully realised. There were moments when I wanted to know these women more intimately rather than encounter them primarily as representatives of a collective experience. Then again, perhaps that is precisely the point. The book insists that history has too often erased these women as individuals, leaving only the collective memory of their suffering.
This story asks difficult questions about whether liberation can ever be complete, whether cycles of violence can truly be broken, and what it costs to imagine a different future. I closed the book feeling that I had read something both ancient and urgently contemporary, and which deserves to be read not simply as a story of women in the Sundarbans, but as a profound reflection on what it means to build a just society from the ruins of an unjust one.
"We were the children of the island. They called us chorer-bacha. Only briefly the children, because any moment now, we would grow up, and we would become them, waking late and hungry and with a job that had no name.
We did not go to school because we already knew everything there was to know. We knew about the work. We knew the sounds, the shrieks and screams of it, we knew the smells. We knew the false notes of pleasure. These were our childhood rhymes, the grunting and howling and laughter and shouting and the thunderous clap of men hitting our mothers." - Tahmima Anam
What follows is less a conventional revolution than an experiment in reimagining society. The women refuse men, educate their children, build a communal way of living and, through technology, discover an unexpected route to economic independence. It is an audacious premise that somehow never loses its emotional truth.
Much of the story is narrated by the children of the island, speaking as a chorus rather than as individuals. At first I found this disorientating, but gradually I realised how powerful the technique is, a device that could easily have been a gimmick and instead becomes the book's whole argument, that a life sold in pieces still adds up to a self, that even a chorus has a memory. These children have grown up without conventional families or individual identities, so their shared narration becomes a statement in itself. They are witnesses to history, but they are also its inheritance. Anam borrows from the Bon Bibi legend the way Rushdie borrows from Islamic cosmology or Okri from Yoruba spirit-worlds, not as decoration but as the only vocabulary available to children raised without one. and through them, innocence sits uneasily beside knowledge, creating moments that are heartbreaking precisely because they are told without sentimentality.
The oppression in the story isn't simplified. Amma is neither monster nor martyr. She is a woman shaped by violence who perpetuates the very system that destroyed her. Kusum, meanwhile, is an inspiring figure, but she is never portrayed as infallible. Her idealism is constantly tested by human frailty, jealousy, fear and trauma. The book understands that liberation is never simply about removing an oppressor. It is about transforming people who have lived so long within oppression that freedom itself becomes difficult to recognise.
The book contains scenes that are profoundly disturbing, exposing the entitlement that underpins sexual violence. When the women withdraw their labour and reclaim their autonomy, the men experience it not simply as rejection but as theft. Their response reveals how deeply power has been mistaken for a right. These scenes are difficult to read, yet they are central to the novel's argument about patriarchy and the limits of male possession.
If I have one reservation, it is that the novel sometimes leans so heavily into allegory that individual characters beyond Kusum and Amma can feel more symbolic than fully realised. There were moments when I wanted to know these women more intimately rather than encounter them primarily as representatives of a collective experience. Then again, perhaps that is precisely the point. The book insists that history has too often erased these women as individuals, leaving only the collective memory of their suffering.
This story asks difficult questions about whether liberation can ever be complete, whether cycles of violence can truly be broken, and what it costs to imagine a different future. I closed the book feeling that I had read something both ancient and urgently contemporary, and which deserves to be read not simply as a story of women in the Sundarbans, but as a profound reflection on what it means to build a just society from the ruins of an unjust one.
"We were the children of the island. They called us chorer-bacha. Only briefly the children, because any moment now, we would grow up, and we would become them, waking late and hungry and with a job that had no name.
We did not go to school because we already knew everything there was to know. We knew about the work. We knew the sounds, the shrieks and screams of it, we knew the smells. We knew the false notes of pleasure. These were our childhood rhymes, the grunting and howling and laughter and shouting and the thunderous clap of men hitting our mothers." - Tahmima Anam
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
🏝️ Sinking island at the edge of the world
👁️ Children as collective narrator and myth-makers
🌊 Trauma that is powerfully real
✊ Uprising from the ground up — no saviors
🌿 Folklore woven into resistance
💔 Mothers who wound and mothers who survive
⚖️ The system as villain
📖 Short, tight, devastating
📚 Shelf Placement
Power, Hunger, Embodiment
💭 Personal Reflections
I would give this ten stars if I could.
Uprising is set on a real place — a government-sanctioned brothel on a sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Tahmima Anam did not invent this island.
She writes in sentences that land like blows to the stomach. Not because they're graphic, though sometimes they are, but because they're precise and beautifully crafted. This book makes you feel every moment and ache.
Anam uses a riff on the Greek chorus to create a narrator that bridges hopelessness and hope: the children of the island, a collective "we", serve as narrator, speaking together across time. It works especially well here because the children occupy this particular position where they're hurt but not yet hopeless. They're willing to have dreams that the adults aren't. They're still willing to believe in fairy tales.
The weaving in and out of individual lives into that shared "we" of the children, as well as their mothers, is seamless. The children reach into the folklore of the Sundarbans to find a frame big enough for what they're living through. Mythology becomes a form of resistance and hope, a way to believe that fairy tales with happy endings are real.
And that isn't easy in a book filled with villains. And in this book men aren't the bad guys. I mean, they ARE the bad guys, but we see carefully how complicated naming villains is in each story of each individual. The system, we are told, is the true villain.
The engine of the story is how women inhabit the system, how they get recruited into perpetuating the very thing that destroyed them. None of it is pretty and easy. The book is unflinching about the fact that bullies start as victims, that victimhood and complicity are not mutually exclusive, that there is always another layer of women participating in the machinery of their own oppression.
In America right now we keep performing shock when women support systems that harm other women. This book is a quiet, precise rebuttal to that shock. It doesn't excuse anything but shows truth.
This is a story suggesting that through unity, through the power of togetherness, a collective voice can overcome. And that's what we want to believe, right? Anam makes you believe it.
At 208 pages it is perfectly paced and perfectly sized. Nothing is wasted. I finished it and immediately wanted to press it into the hands of everyone I know. Unfortunately we gotta wait for it to hit the shelves...
🌈 Representation
The women on the island are explicitly not a monolithic group. Bengali, Garo, Chakma, Santal — the author names the ethnic and Indigenous diversity of the women gathered there early and means it. They arrive from across the spectrum of Bangladeshi poverty and dispossession: farmers, city workers, women sold by husbands, women sold by fathers and mothers.
I'm reading as an outsider to Bangladeshi culture and can't speak to nuances a closer reader would catch.
🔍 Tropes & Power Lens
The system-as-villain framing here is complex. Individual men cause harm, but Anam is more interested in how coercion works structurally: the debt bondage, the isolation, the way power organizes itself so that women enforce the conditions of their own captivity.
The question running underneath everything is where survival ends and complicity begins. Anam doesn't answer it cleanly. That's the right choice.
The women's relationships with each other — tenderness, solidarity, betrayal — are rendered with enough complexity that no one gets to be purely victim or purely villain. That's difficult to pull off and she pulls it off.
⚠️ Content Warnings
Content warnings are non-exhaustive and reflect what stood out to me as a reader.
Sexual violence, child sexual abuse, human trafficking, debt bondage, physical abuse, forced prostitution, pregnancy loss, infant death, violence against women, substance use, parental betrayal.
⭐ Rating⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⭐ 1 star: Did not work for me
⭐⭐ 2 stars: Had real problems
⭐⭐⭐ 3 stars: Decent but didn't quite land
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars: Solid and enjoyable, some reservations
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 stars: Loved it, highly recommend
BookShrink ratings reflect my personal reading experience and apply to books read from 2025 onward.
Thank you to Scribner for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
👁️ Children as collective narrator and myth-makers
🌊 Trauma that is powerfully real
✊ Uprising from the ground up — no saviors
🌿 Folklore woven into resistance
💔 Mothers who wound and mothers who survive
⚖️ The system as villain
📖 Short, tight, devastating
📚 Shelf Placement
Power, Hunger, Embodiment
💭 Personal Reflections
I would give this ten stars if I could.
Uprising is set on a real place — a government-sanctioned brothel on a sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Tahmima Anam did not invent this island.
She writes in sentences that land like blows to the stomach. Not because they're graphic, though sometimes they are, but because they're precise and beautifully crafted. This book makes you feel every moment and ache.
Anam uses a riff on the Greek chorus to create a narrator that bridges hopelessness and hope: the children of the island, a collective "we", serve as narrator, speaking together across time. It works especially well here because the children occupy this particular position where they're hurt but not yet hopeless. They're willing to have dreams that the adults aren't. They're still willing to believe in fairy tales.
The weaving in and out of individual lives into that shared "we" of the children, as well as their mothers, is seamless. The children reach into the folklore of the Sundarbans to find a frame big enough for what they're living through. Mythology becomes a form of resistance and hope, a way to believe that fairy tales with happy endings are real.
And that isn't easy in a book filled with villains. And in this book men aren't the bad guys. I mean, they ARE the bad guys, but we see carefully how complicated naming villains is in each story of each individual. The system, we are told, is the true villain.
The engine of the story is how women inhabit the system, how they get recruited into perpetuating the very thing that destroyed them. None of it is pretty and easy. The book is unflinching about the fact that bullies start as victims, that victimhood and complicity are not mutually exclusive, that there is always another layer of women participating in the machinery of their own oppression.
In America right now we keep performing shock when women support systems that harm other women. This book is a quiet, precise rebuttal to that shock. It doesn't excuse anything but shows truth.
This is a story suggesting that through unity, through the power of togetherness, a collective voice can overcome. And that's what we want to believe, right? Anam makes you believe it.
At 208 pages it is perfectly paced and perfectly sized. Nothing is wasted. I finished it and immediately wanted to press it into the hands of everyone I know. Unfortunately we gotta wait for it to hit the shelves...
🌈 Representation
The women on the island are explicitly not a monolithic group. Bengali, Garo, Chakma, Santal — the author names the ethnic and Indigenous diversity of the women gathered there early and means it. They arrive from across the spectrum of Bangladeshi poverty and dispossession: farmers, city workers, women sold by husbands, women sold by fathers and mothers.
I'm reading as an outsider to Bangladeshi culture and can't speak to nuances a closer reader would catch.
🔍 Tropes & Power Lens
The system-as-villain framing here is complex. Individual men cause harm, but Anam is more interested in how coercion works structurally: the debt bondage, the isolation, the way power organizes itself so that women enforce the conditions of their own captivity.
The question running underneath everything is where survival ends and complicity begins. Anam doesn't answer it cleanly. That's the right choice.
The women's relationships with each other — tenderness, solidarity, betrayal — are rendered with enough complexity that no one gets to be purely victim or purely villain. That's difficult to pull off and she pulls it off.
⚠️ Content Warnings
Content warnings are non-exhaustive and reflect what stood out to me as a reader.
Sexual violence, child sexual abuse, human trafficking, debt bondage, physical abuse, forced prostitution, pregnancy loss, infant death, violence against women, substance use, parental betrayal.
⭐ Rating⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⭐ 1 star: Did not work for me
⭐⭐ 2 stars: Had real problems
⭐⭐⭐ 3 stars: Decent but didn't quite land
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars: Solid and enjoyable, some reservations
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 stars: Loved it, highly recommend
BookShrink ratings reflect my personal reading experience and apply to books read from 2025 onward.
Thank you to Scribner for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Uprising by Tahmima Anam is a powerful and memorable book that belies its slim page count. Set on a sinking island in India, populated by women sold and trafficked into working as prostitutes and their children and told from the perspective of those children, this is a book that seeks to give a voice to those who are too often silenced. Despite the difficult and sometimes brutal subject matter the book is never salacious , instead balancing on a knife edge the suffering of the women and the naivety (in some ways ) of the children who dream of a better future despite knowing deep down that they are likely to follow their mother's into the same line of work, on the island or elsewhere. They do not speak of the boy babies born on the island who disappear, occasionally to distant family members but more often sold to wealthy childless families, instead they speak of legends and fairytales and the magical and mysterious Bon Bibi , the forest sprit who will rescue them from the island. The women, cowed by the daily cruelties of Amma, the sadistic madam who controls them through drugs and various abuses mental, physical and financial see no hope for a better future until the arrival of Kusam Kahn, a young educated woman from the city, who manages to unite the woman, not an easy feat by any means, and ignite a rebellion that will change everything.
This book made me sad, it made me angry and in the end it made me proud. Kusum is no angel sent to save these women, in fact at times she comes close to falling into the familiar routines of Amma, though in a more modern way, but her indomitable spirit and her determination to get justice in some form , even though nothing could truly compensate these women for what they have endured, sees her willing to go to extreme measures. The theme of climate change was well integrated into the story too with the degradation of the island itself mirroring the experiences of the women who lived there.
The way the author could make me care so much about these women in such a short space of time was really impressive, I was fully immersed in their stories and their struggles and was rooting for their victory as though they were real people.
This is a book that will linger in the minds and hearts of those who read it.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.
This book made me sad, it made me angry and in the end it made me proud. Kusum is no angel sent to save these women, in fact at times she comes close to falling into the familiar routines of Amma, though in a more modern way, but her indomitable spirit and her determination to get justice in some form , even though nothing could truly compensate these women for what they have endured, sees her willing to go to extreme measures. The theme of climate change was well integrated into the story too with the degradation of the island itself mirroring the experiences of the women who lived there.
The way the author could make me care so much about these women in such a short space of time was really impressive, I was fully immersed in their stories and their struggles and was rooting for their victory as though they were real people.
This is a book that will linger in the minds and hearts of those who read it.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.
June 6, 2026
Short novel set in BANGLADESH
By the river in Mongla, Bangladesh (the gateway to the Sundarbans) in the Bengal Delta lies a long and narrow, desolate and sinking island, where women are held in a prostitute community against their will. It is ruled by Amma, a woman who unyieldingly wields her power. Men come to the island, children are born and still the misery continues.
Reviews describe the story as ‘unflinching” and indeed it is, but then it turns its attention to the children of these women, who create a world for themselves. Throughout the narrative the older women, who are servicing the men, are described as the ‘mothers’.
In the story, Kusum is singled out for the particular trauma she has to bear. She is made pregnant, she is led to believe that a punter – Farid – will make her his own when she gives birth to a boy. He already has a wife, he wants to take the child and there is nothing she can do. Inevitably depression follows. She is not the only woman who produces offspring, the baby females are taken away as an investment for the future, the mothers continue with their trade, now attracting men who have a proclivity for lactating females. And yes, if you are asking as you read this review, I did find it hard and repulsive to read in parts!
But Amma does not maintain her hold over the women forever and this story delves into to the dynamics of a group of women who have been cowed into submission, who demonstrate aspects of Stockholm Syndrome yet also long for something different, nevertheless wondering what ‘freedom’ actually means. There are nods to Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid’s Tale as the group dynamics change and evolve.
This is indeed an unflinching look at forced prostitution, the power dynamics between men and women and the projection of blame on to innocent parties – the people on the mainland for the most part see the women incarcerated on the island as evil sirens, luring the hapless and feckless men who cannot withstand the temptation.
A story – bleak at times – with a wider and powerful resonance across society today.
#ADPR
By the river in Mongla, Bangladesh (the gateway to the Sundarbans) in the Bengal Delta lies a long and narrow, desolate and sinking island, where women are held in a prostitute community against their will. It is ruled by Amma, a woman who unyieldingly wields her power. Men come to the island, children are born and still the misery continues.
Reviews describe the story as ‘unflinching” and indeed it is, but then it turns its attention to the children of these women, who create a world for themselves. Throughout the narrative the older women, who are servicing the men, are described as the ‘mothers’.
In the story, Kusum is singled out for the particular trauma she has to bear. She is made pregnant, she is led to believe that a punter – Farid – will make her his own when she gives birth to a boy. He already has a wife, he wants to take the child and there is nothing she can do. Inevitably depression follows. She is not the only woman who produces offspring, the baby females are taken away as an investment for the future, the mothers continue with their trade, now attracting men who have a proclivity for lactating females. And yes, if you are asking as you read this review, I did find it hard and repulsive to read in parts!
But Amma does not maintain her hold over the women forever and this story delves into to the dynamics of a group of women who have been cowed into submission, who demonstrate aspects of Stockholm Syndrome yet also long for something different, nevertheless wondering what ‘freedom’ actually means. There are nods to Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid’s Tale as the group dynamics change and evolve.
This is indeed an unflinching look at forced prostitution, the power dynamics between men and women and the projection of blame on to innocent parties – the people on the mainland for the most part see the women incarcerated on the island as evil sirens, luring the hapless and feckless men who cannot withstand the temptation.
A story – bleak at times – with a wider and powerful resonance across society today.
#ADPR
June 26, 2026
✨ Firstly, this book was brought to my attention by Dr. Almas when she said that you have to read then I know that I have to read it. So thank you for that.
✨ When I started reading this book, I knew it was about a bunch of women living on an island and who have been forced into prostitution. The author has done an incredible job writing this book with raw and unfiltered dialogues. There is no sugarcoating of the slangs and the terminology, you wouldn't feel that you're not present there witnessing the debacle. The chapters are short and writing lucid.
✨ Initially I felt that I might binge read it and rightly so I was doing it until I wasn't. It felt like, yeah, this is what happens in our society, this is how girls are sold, some by their parents and some by their partners. It felt like a norm but there came a point in the book where I felt rage, anger and shame. Not because it was happening to them, but because I was thinking how absurdly conditioned we are that we accept everything and do nothing about it.
✨ I realised that this is the life of real women, irrespective of how we are conditioned to accept this dark reality, this shouldn't be the norm, we are not supposed to think like that, we are not supposed to not feel comfortable even while reading it, we are not supposed to ignore the labour and the exploitation women go through. As a woman, as a privileged person, it all came crashing down on me, and that's when I felt ashamed of myself and of the society as a whole.
✨ The book is set on a small island in Bangladesh exposing the system, how everything is rigged and corrupt, how people can get away with anything if they know the right people, have money and power.
✨ It made me feel sad and disheartened that the narrators were the little girls who knew nothing about their fathers but were exposed to such a world. It made me feel sad about how much those women craved love and all they got was betrayal and disgust.
✨ Also it's an interesting take on the uprisings and revolutions that needn't be only the right of the educated.
I buddy read it with Swati and in all honesty this is how I felt.
✨ When I started reading this book, I knew it was about a bunch of women living on an island and who have been forced into prostitution. The author has done an incredible job writing this book with raw and unfiltered dialogues. There is no sugarcoating of the slangs and the terminology, you wouldn't feel that you're not present there witnessing the debacle. The chapters are short and writing lucid.
✨ Initially I felt that I might binge read it and rightly so I was doing it until I wasn't. It felt like, yeah, this is what happens in our society, this is how girls are sold, some by their parents and some by their partners. It felt like a norm but there came a point in the book where I felt rage, anger and shame. Not because it was happening to them, but because I was thinking how absurdly conditioned we are that we accept everything and do nothing about it.
✨ I realised that this is the life of real women, irrespective of how we are conditioned to accept this dark reality, this shouldn't be the norm, we are not supposed to think like that, we are not supposed to not feel comfortable even while reading it, we are not supposed to ignore the labour and the exploitation women go through. As a woman, as a privileged person, it all came crashing down on me, and that's when I felt ashamed of myself and of the society as a whole.
✨ The book is set on a small island in Bangladesh exposing the system, how everything is rigged and corrupt, how people can get away with anything if they know the right people, have money and power.
✨ It made me feel sad and disheartened that the narrators were the little girls who knew nothing about their fathers but were exposed to such a world. It made me feel sad about how much those women craved love and all they got was betrayal and disgust.
✨ Also it's an interesting take on the uprisings and revolutions that needn't be only the right of the educated.
I buddy read it with Swati and in all honesty this is how I felt.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews