playing games

The financial times 16 december 2023

Playing Games is Huma Qureshi’s fourth book and first novel. Born in the UK into a family of Pakistani heritage, her previous works include a memoir, How We Met, and a collection of short stories, Things We Do Not Tell People We Love, which featured women of Pakistani origin unable to communicate honestly with the people closest to them. Her memoir told the story of how, after trying Muslim-specific dating websites with no luck, she met and married her husband, a white Englishman who converted to Islam to be with her.  Playing Games seems, on the face of it, a change of direction, barely touching on religion or cultural concerns. It focuses on two sisters in their early thirties living in north London: Hana, a married lawyer, and her younger sister Mira, who works in a coffee shop and lives in a crappy house share while trying to write her first play. Their mother, an art teacher, died 11 years ago, something both sisters are still wrestling with. Hana has fled from any kind of artistic endeavour and runs her life with obsessive control, while Mira is happy to pursue a larger dream.  Gentle humour runs through the book: Mira’s play is called Pavements and is about characters who lie down on the pavement — somehow she can’t work out why, but she persists nonetheless, and not only because she has a crush on her writing tutor, Dominic. Hana, meanwhile, has her own problems, albeit in a more sombre vein. Married to Samir, she is desperately trying to get pregnant. Qureshi writes with sensitivity about the slog of a couple feeling they must have sex when Hana is ovulating, producing some of the saddest and most insightful passages of the book: “She can tell that he’s finding it difficult to climax again . . . Immediately afterwards Hana feels terrible and ashamed for pressuring him into it.” Despite this somewhat two-sided set-up, the novel’s strength lies in Qureshi choosing not to demonise either of the sisters, but instead entering their points of view in alternate chapters. While Mira finds Hana stifling and uptight, we can also see that Hana feels responsible for her younger, less financially stable sibling. As Hana says to Mira, “Some of us don’t just get to drop out of life and have everyone else pick up the pieces.” If occasionally a little pedestrian, the novel is well-crafted. Qureshi also has a talent for writing children and the longing for children, which reminded me of Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (2020), a novel about a woman with an unspecified mental illness that makes her doubt whether she would be a good mother. In Playing Games, Hana watches the young son of a friend: “He is wearing denim shorts that fall past his knees and a little white button-down; his cheeks have caught the sun, like over-ripe peaches, and his eyes are big, wondrous. He is so beautiful.” The sisters’ relationship reaches a crisis when Mira lifts dialogue she overhears and uses it in a play, yet Qureshi manages not to make these debates within the novel about the ethics of using material from your own life seem too self-referential. At one point, Mira mentions that she always feels the expectation that she will explore her ethnicity in her work; a mirror for Qureshi’s feelings, perhaps. I certainly got the sense that having written directly about her Muslim identity, Qureshi now wants to address other themes. Whatever the book’s limitations, it feels important that race is barely mentioned. Instead, Playing Games is all about sisterhood, in all its gnarly glory.

This review originally appeared in The Financial Times