Cover of Terrorist

Terrorist

The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam.

Read more

The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.

But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot, God is the best.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 320 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Terrorist? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Terrorist. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Self's Deception Shares fiction, terrorism, mystery
  2. Incendiary Shares fiction, terrorism, contemporary
  3. The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda Shares terrorism, political, security
  4. Purity Shares fiction, literary fiction, literature

“People who read Terrorist tend to reach for these next.”

  1. My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir
  2. Almost Dead
  3. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden
  4. The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America

“If you want more of the same (literary fiction about terrorism), start with these.”

  1. The Lay of the Land
  2. The Bascombe Novels
  3. The Lost Legends of New Jersey
  4. Aberration of Starlight

“If it was the literature that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Sportswriter
  2. Freedom
  3. Falling Man
  4. Housekeeping

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Tallulahland
  2. Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11
  3. Love in a Headscarf
  4. The High Price of Materialism