Good People

Sabit debuts with an electrifying whodunit about the suspicious death of an Afghan American teen. The Sharaf family fled Afghanistan for northern Virginia, where Rahmat manages to build a fortune via a one-man gutter-cleaning business while Maryam raises their four children. They move into a mansion and send their children to exclusive schools, with visions of their older daughter, Zorah, attending an Ivy League university and becoming a Supreme Court justice. Then Zorah’s body is found in a submerged Mercedes, and her death is rumored to be an honor killing. Structured like an oral history, in which none of the Sharafs speak for themselves, the novel creates a complex portrait of the family through interviews with others in their Afghan community along with classmates, school officials, lawyers and journalists. Along the way, Sabit lays bare jealousies, rifts, and competing perceptions. For example, the first-generation immigrants interviewed describe Zorah as a girl run amok, while her classmates recall a girl who dressed modestly in gym class and wasn’t allowed to mention boys at home. While the large cast blurs together, Sabit expertly captures the cadence of her characters’ voices and the tangle of their cultural biases. This propulsive tale heralds Sabit as a writer worth keeping tabs on. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Feb.)