What Kept You opens in death: fires are raging through the Sydney hills, where Jahan lives with her husband, Ali. The revelation that she is grieving her nani’s death follows shortly afterwards and, a beat later, we learn she has suffered a miscarriage.
In the early pages of her extraordinary debut, Raaza Jamshed warns the reader this is not a story of clean endings and tidy miracles. This is a novel full of ritual and poetry. A type of witchcraft, and of healing. “Perhaps, that’s what I’m trying to do here – to build a staircase out of words, to climb towards you to the sky or descend into the grave and lie down beside you,” Jahan writes of her nani.
