In various moments the novel is asking: how can we achieve the strong bonds of sisterhood without adhering to the limitations of cis womanhood or girlhood? What separates When We Were Sisters from Asghar’s past work though is not its questions about womanhood or even childhood, but its inquisitions into gender itself. Like her web series Brown Girls, the novel is committed to an honest portrayal of the lives of queer women of color. Like many of the poems in If They Come For Us, Asghar’s prose in her novel is lyric, gentle, and fierce. The novel has all the marks of a beautiful Fatimah Asghar production. What follows is the tale of an intense bond between sisters: caught between American culture and their family’s Pakistani background with no elders to guide them, the girls turn to each other to learn how to navigate a foreign land and culture. Promising them a life filled with adventure at a “zoo,” he instead takes them to a cramped apartment with bird cages lining the walls where they are confined to their rooms, isolated from the outside world except for school, and often left for days at a time without food or money. After their father’s death, the siblings are forced to live with their Uncle, a man neither of the siblings ultimately trusts. Parts of the book’s premise borrow from Asghar’s life: as the story opens, the sibling’s mother has been dead for many years, and their father is murdered not long into the book. When We Were Sisters follows three Pakistani siblings living in the United States: Noreen, the smart and responsible eldest Aisha, the angry and unpredictable middle child and Kausar, the youngest, and the book’s narrator. This skill of Asghar’s is on full display in her debut novel When We Were Sisters. What makes Asghar’s work special is her ability to imbue beauty and nostalgia into any moment, be it something completely mundane like ordering a pizza or a period filled with chaos and dread, like a family tragedy. Her work-which includes the breathtaking poetry collection If They Come For Us and the Emmy-Nominated web series Brown Girls-often centers around the themes of queerness, family, and the immigrant experience. Asghar, a Chicago-based poet, writer, and artist, is the child of two Pakistani-Muslim refugees, both of whom died by the time she was five. he orders a slice with no sauce,” a young Asghar observes.

When Fatimah Asghar pictures her father alive, she imagines him ordering a pizza.

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar