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Shop nowThe Royal Abduls
Length
9 hours 37 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Neil Shah & Soneela Nankani
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreRamiza Shamoun Koya reveals the devastating cost of anti-Muslim sentiment in The Royal Abduls, her debut novel about an Indian America family.
Evolutionary biologist Amina Abdul accepts a post-doc in Washington, DC, choosing her career studying hybrid zones over a faltering West Coast romance. Her brother and sister-in-law welcome her to the city, but their marriage is crumbling, and they soon rely on her to keep their son company.
Omar, hungry to understand his cultural roots, fakes an Indian accent, invents a royal past, and peppers his aunt with questions about their cultural heritage. When he brings an ornamental knife to school, his expulsion triggers a downward spiral for his family, even as Amina struggles to find her own place in an America now at war with people who look like her.
With The Royal Abduls, Koya ignites the canon of post-9/11 literature with a deft portrait of second-generation American identity.
Ramiza Shamoun Koya has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in publications such as Columbia Review, Lumina, Washington Square Review, and Mutha Magazine. She has been a fellow at both MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center. Her father was born in Fiji, her mother in Texas, and she was born in California. She lives with her daughter and two cats.
Neil Shah is the founder and director of the Stress Management Society and is an international authority on stress-management and well-being issues. He has helped thousands of people tackle stress through one-on-one coaching and workshops, and he travels all over the world to teach his unique stress-management techniques.
Soneela Nankani is an award-winning narrator with over three hundred titles in many different genres including Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, and Nonfiction. She has garnered sixteen Earphones Awards, nominations for Audie and SOVAS awards, and was recently awarded AudioFile magazine’s Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Honor. Her audiobooks have been featured in Best Audiobooks lists by AudioFile magazine and the Washington Post, among others. In her spare time, she loves to read (yes, really), learn languages, try new recipes, and travel. She lives in the DC area with her husband and two mischievous daughters.
Reviews
“Koya writes sharply about what it means to be South Asian in the US after 9/11, and skillfully weaves the family members’ conflicts and predicaments. This is a mature, fully realized effort.”
“The Royal Abduls is filled with wonderfully flawed, yet deeply sympathetic characters who occupy utterly convincing and beautifully drawn narrative and emotional situations…Koya performs the marvelous alchemy of dropping us into a story world that dismantles and then reassembles our sense of who we are.”
“The Royal Abduls is a novel for our times. It is a novel of struggle and a reminder of the hope that we once felt and that, hopefully, we will feel again soon.”
“Koya has crafted a tender-hearted story with a sharp knife edge. She’s cut to the heart of the devastating effects of colonialism and white supremacy on multigenerational American immigrant families.”
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