Tahmima Anam’s Uprising reveals a group of children witnessing their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude on a desolate sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Bought and sold by Amma, the ruthless madam who was once herself sold into slavery, as the victim becomes the perpetrator, the women have accepted their fates as sex workers. Yet their children weave fantastic tales, imagining that someday they will escape the island and enjoy a life of freedom. 

When Kusum Khan, a young educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island and the very order of things.

Uprising is a drama of resistance and female power by an author who “deftly weaves the personal and the political case and the story of revolution no one saw it coming, giving voice to the silenced.

A mere 20 huts long and four huts wide, the island is Jahannam Tartarus- It is hell.

As a journalist, Anam visited the  notorious “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh “at the end of the country in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, where a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work-“ we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money and also in bodies” and wish a different life for themselves.  The island is a prison. The mothers are ghosts of their former selves. The children, witnessing the “sexing”, are all too grown up, stripped of their innocence. By the time they are born, their mothers’ memories have faded “like a paint in the sun’, they live on the island “tied to” their daughters. What or who, will it take to break free from these chains?

Uprising by Tahmima Anam, Canongate £16.99, 208 pages.