Young Shurjomukhi's family lives in Dhaka like any other family during the day, going about its daily routine of attending school, working, and taking care of the home in a country that is yet in its formative years. But every night, as soon as their asymmetrical house is enveloped in darkness, they switch to the Unknown realm. The family is joined for dinner by Shurjo's uncles, who were martyred in Sylhet's tea gardens at the beginning of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, and her grandmother, who committed herself by falling into a well at the end of the Second World War. Death does not exist on the Unknown side.These dinners are festive affairs, replete with the joy of reunion, music and stories, but underneath the celebration, Shurjo's family is riddled with the traumas of their past: death, war, migration, separation, the inability to belong to a land, dwelling in an in-between space, an eternal limbo. And when the miasmic shadow of the past inevitably falls on young Shurjo, the pitfalls of their dual reality is laid bare. The only way forward is an upheaval that splits the family apart, flinging Shurjo and her parents to the other end of the world. Imaginative and compelling, Shurjo's Clan merges magical realism with a vivid historicity to paint an entirely contemporary portrait of how grief is inherited, how the traumas and memories of our ancestors continue to shape those who come long after. Spanning decades, from the forced migration of Bengalis to East Pakistan in 1947, through the 1971 liberation war, the wave of immigrants to the West in the 1980s, and a final return, Iffat Nawaz's lyrical and evocative prose marks the arrival of a distinctive voice, one that unravels questions of grief, belonging, identity, and family with delightful imaginativeness and devastating insight. With its mesmerising balance between inexplicable otherworldliness and undeniable reality, this debut novel asks, above all, how we can honour the past without letting its wounds destroy us.