Land of No Regrets by Sadi Muktadir

Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw

Few novels win me over unless I can connect with the characters, the narrative, or the setting. Elegant prose, a tightly constructed plot, and natural-sounding dialogue are valuable tools of the craft, but they don’t necessarily hook me as a reader. At first, I wasn’t sure that Sadi Muktadir’s debut novel would either. Its setting—Toronto and the countryside north of it—its cast of young Muslim Canadian boys at an Islamic boarding school, and its coming-of-age theme did not seem likely to resonate with me, a septuagenarian white Canadian from British Columbia and Quebec. Yet the novel’s glowing reviews prompted me to give it a try. To my surprise, I soon discovered connections I hadn’t expected, along with a universality that emerges gently but convincingly throughout the story.

The novel opens with Nabil, fresh out of middle school in Toronto. His last day is crowned with triumph: he pitches his school team to victory in the baseball championship and, at last, his tentative romance with his classmate Alana—white, beautiful, and out of reach until then—seems to begin in earnest. His conservative Gujarati Muslim parents, however, disapprove of this slide into what they see as Canadianism. At his uncle’s urging, they decide to send Nabil to Al Haque Islamic Academy, a religious boarding school in the middle of nowhere. There, Nabil’s dreams of baseball glory and young love soon collapse, and he longs for escape and for a return to normal life.

Here, I found my first connection. Having spent my Catholic childhood in parochial schools and attending Sunday Mass, I was acquainted with the fate of fellow students dispatched to ultra-religious convent schools for minor transgressions. Muktadir crosswalks this dynamic vividly. Al Haque Academy, as it turns out, once housed the Sacred Heart Convent, a Catholic girls’ school. When Nabil and his friends discover in a little used storage room, the diary of a former student, Cynthia Lewis, they see their own desires reflected in her desperate wish to escape with her best friend, Cat. They make a pact: if Cynthia finds her way out of the convent school by the diary’s end, they will follow suit and bust out of Al Haque. To prolong the suspense, they ration their readings of the diary, all the while resisting the madrasa’s rigid regime of Quranic recitation, Hadith exegesis, relentless piety, and corporal punishment—the last doled out by teachers aptly nicknamed Heart Attack One, Two, Three, and Four. The scenes brought back my own memories of strict Catholic discipline: the strap at my elementary school, or the strange punishment at my sister’s convent school, where girls were made to lie on the chapel floor with arms outstretched to atone for being late for school.

While Land of No Regrets could appear at times primarily as a critique of traditional Islamic education, it is more nuanced. The novel contains thoughtful musings on the devotee’s relationship to the material world and on the virtues of piety. Nabil is the chief contemplator, while his muscular friend Nawwaz is driven more by fear of God, teachers and parents—seeing sin even in the act of reading Cynthia’s diary. Another friend, Maaz, outwardly conforms to righteousness but secretly conspires with his peers’ rebellious schemes. The final member of Nabil's gang, Farid, courts confrontation, almost relishing his beatings by the Heart Attack quartet, as badges of honour. Confusion, defiance, and longing animate these four fourteen-year-olds, making them both believable and sympathetic.

One of the novel’s most touching turns comes when the boys manage to contact Cynthia by phone. She responds with empathy, kindness, and practical advice, bridging the gulf between different eras, religions, and experiences. Muktadir excels at such moments, weaving together lives that seem far apart yet share the same dilemmas. With seamless transitions between exposition and dialogue, and with chapters that flow coherently, he delivers a novel that offers readers outside his cultural milieu a way in—without diluting the authenticity of his world.

The novel does have its shortcomings. Muktadir’s dialogue often brims with street slang and a dense mix of Arabic and Gujarati words, and Islamic terminology. While this enriches the texture of the novel, it can also distance readers unfamiliar with this vocabulary. For those not steeped in the idioms of young Muslim Torontonians of South Asian descent, a glossary would have been a welcome addition. Instead, one is left either inferring meaning, erring in meaning or pausing to consult Google. To a degree, the brutality of the discipline by Al Haque’s teachers could stir up Islamophobia, but somehow I doubt that bigots will be buying this book anyway. A final blemish, at least in my view, is that both the title and the book cover image of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec are esoteric—in fact, quite obscure. In my head, I can imagine the back-and-forth between the author and his editor on these points.

Despite its minor imperfections, Land of No Regrets succeeds as both a vivid coming-of-age tale and a thoughtful exploration of faith, friendship, and the longing for freedom. For me, the book’s great strength lies in how it nudged me to revisit forgotten memories while drawing me into a world that, at first glance, seemed far removed from my own.

Land of No Regrets is published by HarperCollins.