Publishers Weekly
★ 04/29/2019
Hanif, Booker-longlisted for A Case of Exploding Mangoes, dives headfirst into an unnamed desert in the present day and the disparate characters stuck in it. Ellie, an American bomber pilot who’s crash-landed, struggles through the desert half-hallucinating until he comes upon a dog. The dog, Mutt, is no stray, but rather the beloved and disgruntled pet of Momo, a shrewd and scheming 15-year-old. Momo lives in a nearby refugee camp with his family, who have been devastated by the disappearance of Momo’s older brother, Ali, who left the camp to work at a mysterious American army outpost that was recently nearby. As Ellie recovers in the camp he was intended to bomb, hoping for rescue and suppressing a major trauma he left back at home in the States, Momo develops a plan to use the American soldier as leverage to get his brother back. Narrated in turns by Ellie, Momo, aid workers, Momo’s mother, and rather beautifully by Mutt, Hanif’s portrait of the surrealism and commonplaceness of America’s wars in Muslim countries is nearly impossible to put down. The camp in particular crackles with humanity, bizarreness, and banality—at one point, Ellie thinks, “I was beginning to like this, people talking earnestly about sewage and cheating spouses, about the need for winter shelters and better ways of teaching math.” The novel manages to remain delightful and unpredictable even in its darkest moments, highlighting the hypocrisies and constant confusions of American intervention abroad. (May)
From the Publisher
Praise for Red Birds:
“Hanif, Booker-longlisted for A Case of Exploding Mangoes, dives headfirst into an unnamed desert in the present day…Hanif’s portrait of the surrealism and commonplaceness of America’s wars in Muslim countries is nearly impossible to put down. The camp in particular crackles with humanity, bizarreness, and banality…The novel manages to remain delightful and unpredictable even in its darkest moments, highlighting the hypocrisies and constant confusions of American intervention abroad.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Red Birds is a piercingly laugh-out-loud novel in a genre that doesn’t often abide comedy. But Hanif pushes his narrative beyond mere irony, expanding his critique of America’s military interventions to include satire, ghost stories and absurdist touches — up to and including a canine narrator that’s usually smarter than any human in the room.” —Washington Post
"An incisive, unsparing critique of war and of America’s role in the destruction of the Middle East...Hanif is dexterous and ambitious with the literary tools of both east and west...Combine this with humour as cutting as Heller or Evelyn Waugh...and you have something wildly original." –Guardian
“Funny, fresh, and not afraid to draw blood, this is an unusual gem of a book.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Hanif has written a splendidly satirical novel that beautifully captures the absurdity and folly of war and its ineluctable impact on its survivors. At turns funny and heartbreaking, it is a memorable contribution to the literature of conflict.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Red Birds is a fresh marvel, describing with cool wit and steely yet tender intelligence the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape – and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts.” —Guardian
“[A] wonderfully strange exploration of the effects of war on civilians. Mohmmed Hanif's Red Birds is part Catch-22, part Slaughterhouse-Five, part Kafka's The Castle, and all Hanif's darkly satirical wit and wildly creative imagination.” —BookBrowse
“An impressive multi-voiced performance that straddles bitter tragedy and pungent black comedy, grounded realism and flighty absurdity … Red Birds thrums with rambunctious energy… this is writing with guts, satire with bite” —National
“An acutely observed refugee tale … Both achingly realistic and elusively metaphysical … dripping with exuberant disdain for the way in which western power has corrupted the world … an effective satire that reminds us that everybody— refugees, distraught mothers, unthinking airmen, well-meaning aid workers, dogs and ghosts – has a need to love, and be loved” —Observer
“A blistering, savage, tragicomic satire about the cruelty of war and the impossibility of peace … Hanif writes of violence and bitterness with flashes of hilarity that underline his anger and his humanity.” — Times
“Hanif has a talent for taking the most serious subjects…and, in a style indebted to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, emphasising their fundamental absurdity through satire. Hanif's authorial gifts are undeniable and Red Birds is written with ambition and powerful satirical anger.” —Literary Review
"Deploying a relentlessly grim gallows humour, Hanif skewers the entrenched insanity of conflict … Hanif’s bleak, formidable use of irony burns deeply." —Daily Mail
Praise for Mohammed Hanif:
“Mohammed Hanif is a brave, gifted writer.” —Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West
“Witty, elegant, and deliciously anarchic. Hanif has a lovely eye and an even better ear.” —John le Carré, on Case of the Exploding Mangoes
“An insanely brilliant, satirical first novel . . . Belongs in a tradition that includes Catch-22, but it also calls to mind the biting comedy of Philip Roth.” —Washington Post, on Case of the Exploding Mangoes
“A comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel… Hanif does Karachi better than Rushdie does Bombay… Relentlessly readable, compulsively so as it surges towards it apocalyp-tic conclusion” —Guardian, on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
Library Journal
04/01/2019
Major Ellie, a beleaguered American fighter pilot, has crash-landed in the desert during a bombing run. He's rescued by Momo, a resourceful, street-smart 15-year-old resident of the refugee camp that had been the target of the operation. This seems like good fortune to Momo, as he's busy planning a rescue mission to the nearby American base to retrieve his older brother, who has disappeared after going to work there. The bulk of the novel comprises alternating chapters from the perspectives of Ellie, Momo, and Momo's loyal canine companion, unceremoniously named Mutt, who is the wisest and most articulate of the three. Even the philosophizing Mutt, though, is blind to his own prejudices, and much sly humor results from hearing the same incidents recounted by three unreliable narrators. As Ellie half-heartedly plots an escape from the chaotic refugee camp, whose residents have been largely abandoned by Western aid societies, the perceptive Mutt is the first to sniff out that something is not quite right about the American. VERDICT Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) has written a biting satire in the form of a literary ghost story brimming with boundless compassion and a deep appreciation for absurdity in what is, ultimately, an unwinnable conflict.—Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile
Fans of the modern classic CATCH-22 will be pleased to hear narrator David Bendena’s warm voice deliver this thought-provoking story, which explores the ugliness of war and U.S. meddling overseas. Told from several perspectives, the story kicks off when Major Ellie’s plane crashes in an unknown Middle Eastern desert he is supposed to bomb. Depleted and struggling to survive, he chances upon Momo and his dog, Mutt, and is taken to their camp. There, he becomes entangled in the struggles of people whose lives he is supposed to take. Bendena’s fluid voice and careful pacing bring the characters to life, especially Mutt, who speaks with a swaggering American accent. Bendena’s performance makes this otherwise challenging work interesting. A.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
