Broken Heart Syndrome: A Novel

A vivid portrait of a Somali British family whose bonds are tested when past violence and betrayals return to haunt them, from the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Fortune Men

“Nadifa Mohamed is a revelation—she writes with the fierce compassionate lightning of a truth-teller, lays bare the ghastly colonial condition that afflicts so many of us, where truth cannot overcome injustice.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Yasmin, a doctor in a London neonatal ICU, is at her limit with her demanding mother and ungrateful sister. So when Yasmin’s sister, Ayan, gets engaged, Yasmin sees it as a welcome invitation—soon the attention will all be on Ayan, who now bears the weight of providing grandchildren for their hovering mother, Amina.

Yasmin, Ayan, and Amina are three in a mosaic of characters in South-West London, where families moved from East Africa to escape political violence but now find themselves in an increasingly hostile Britain. Also among them are Khalid, a cab driver whose daily plagues include arguing with traffic cops and stopping passengers from vaping, and Halima, a young mother who is grappling with both a deceitful ex-boyfriend and her relationship to Islam. Their paths are all set on a collision course when Amina collapses from shock after claiming to have seen the man who murdered her brother, Hassan, back in Somalia during the 1990s Civil War; just days later, Yasmin finds a bag of cassettes recorded by Hassan, and she goes searching for answers where most discourage her from looking.

Broken Heart Syndrome is a profound portrait of families making home in a new country, but unable to outrun the pains of the past. Here is an engagement to wedding novel par excellence, calling from the outer ring of London, where buses travel but tube does not. With the sumptuous descriptions of sambusas cooking, maghrib prayers, and ornate wedding abayas of London brides, contrasted with the violence and increasingly panicked missives from a war-torn Mogadishu, Mohamed transports readers to a community on the brink, where the hunt for justice threatens to bring long-boiling tensions to a riotous conclusion.