The Good Sister

Morgan Jones

12 July 2018
9780230769878
266 pages

Synopsis

'Syria, Isis, radicalisation, parental love & the zeitgeist wrapped up in a poetic page-turner of epic proportions' - James O'Brien, author of How to Be Right

What would you do if your daughter fled towards danger? Morgan Jones' The Good Sister shows just how far one father will go to rescue a daughter who doesn't want to be saved.

One quiet morning, with her father still asleep, seventeen-year old Sofia Mounir, disillusioned with her life in London, boards a flight to Turkey.

By the time the police know she’s missing, Sofia is already in Syria, ready to fight for the only cause she still believes in.

Her devastated father knows he must save her and will go to the end of the earth to bring her back.

But how do you rescue a daughter who doesn’t want to be saved?

Syria, Isis, radicalisation, parental love & the zeitgeist wrapped up in a poetic page-turner of epic proportions
Sofia’s visceral chronicle of self-radicalisation is delivered in a persuasive voice. It could have been a literary novel along the lines of Kamila Shamsie’s award-winning Home Fire, but a tense second strand is added – the desperate Abraham, whom she regards as westernised and lost to the faith, travelling to Syria in an attempt to save her. His terrifying encounters with people-traffickers and violent jihadis pulse with tension. But the real achievement of the novel lies in the portrait of a naive young woman realising that the pure religious caliphate she has committed to is a place of betrayal, misogyny and lethal danger.
Morgan Jones’s The Good Sister centres on a father heading to Syria via Turkey on a rescue mission . . . Interwoven with his narrative is the first-person story of his teenage daughter Sofia, a devout Muslim who flees to the “caliphate”, where she is swiftly married to a mujahid . . . Both are handled remarkably convincingly in an enthralling adventure story peopled with memorable characters