Song of Our Swampland Book Launch

Contact: hannah@peepaltreepress.com

BOOK LAUNCH & AUTHOR SIGNING

When the killing starts in Dhaka, the villagers know the army from West Pakistan will soon be in their area, but unlike the other young men, and his beloved step-sister Moni Banu, Kamal cannot join the resistance. Born with a hole for a mouth, most people, except Abbas Miah, the teacher who adopts him, his friends and Moni Banu, regard him as the village idiot. With Abbas Miah, Kamal embarks on a Noah’s ark journey, with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes, to find refuge in the distant floodplains until the war is over. Along with a bombastic old actor, the village mullah, the village cut-throat, two Hindu boatmen, a foul-mouthed old woman,
and a pious Islamist, who might just be a collaborator, Kamal discovers that there can be no escape from the war and the issues it raises. As our guide to the painful emergence of the new nation of Bangladesh, Kamal is
forced both to observe the face of evil, the complexity of betrayal, and look within to discover whether he has the capacity for true community, whether he can follow the injunction: “If someone knocks on your door, you don’t ask who it is. You don’t even look at their face. You just do everything you can for them.”

Copies available for £10.

Getting to Toynbee Hall:
Tube: Aldgate East District, Hammersmith & City lines (2 minute walk)

Buses: Nos 15, 25, 115 & 253 pass the bottom of Commercial
Street along Whitechapel High Street. No 67 from Stoke Newington/Stamford Hill via Dalston & Shoreditch stop on Commercial Street outside Toynbee Hall.

Entry: Free

Time: 6:00pm