Godzilla and the Song Bird

This immersive and powerful story has at its heart the continuing friendship between three boys with a love of cinema. Godzilla and the Song Bird is truly a War and Peace for Bangladesh, with Tolstoyan philosophical depth (and unTolstoyan humour!), and infused with a uniquely contemporary Bangla voice. As a vision of the world, it has a rich mix of its darkness and light, with scene after scene of brilliant storytelling driving the narrative, revealing truths about the difficult emergence of a postcolonial society and the double-edged nature of storytelling as a characteristic of Bengali culture.

“The human, mystical, animal and ghostly worlds mix and mingle in this vivid book. Islam knows how to hold and direct the reader’s imagination. Wonderfully exuberant.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown