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Title: In the Light of What We Know
Author: Zia Haider Rahman
Narrator: Ralph Lister
Format: Unabridged
Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-15-14
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 69 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope-from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton-and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor seeks atonement, and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world-and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.

Critic Reviews:
"Beautifully written and renewed evidence that some of the most interesting writing in English is coming from the edges of old empires." (
Kirkus Starred Review)

Members Reviews:
Challenging, but beautifully written and conceived
Any additional comments?
This is a dense novel but the writing and performance are outstanding. It is full of ideas and I had to go buy a hard copy because I wanted to underline sections of it and be able to refer back to it. It is about our times and about identity and exile. Especially brilliant on the latter. It is not a page turner and I did put it down a couple of times. But it always drew me back in and I felt a resonance with its ideas and a deep sympathy for the two main characters, the narrator and his friend Zafar.

Listened twice.
Beautiful writing. Wonderful character development; I will have Zafar as a permanent resident in my personal list of memorable fictional characters. This is a very rich work of philosophical and social commentary.

dreadful
I have a doctorate in philosophy; I read many, many books; I like serious fiction. I say all that simply to let you know that my feelings about this book are not because I am in any sense anti-intellectual or averse to ambitious fiction. This, however, is fake fiction. It's as if someone had devised some sort of hot air balloon that has just the right contours and just the right behavior to make it appear like a fighter jet on distant radar. This book, with its pretentious epigraphs, its exotic locations, its occasionally inflated vocabulary, its adolescent opining on politics and philosophy, its world weary sophisticates, its post-colonial ambiance is just that sort of hollow fake designed to push the buttons of wanna-be's, middlebrows, and hipsters. But beneath all the posturing, it's basically a not terribly good soap opera. And I suppose that's why I so strongly dislike it: it isn't an honest failure; it's a cynical fraud by someone who likes to play at being a writer but lacks any real inspiration other than a desire to strike poses. I honestly feel like I've been robbed of many hours of my life.

A Tour De Force of philosophy and literature
This book is exceptional in its beauty of language and depth of intellectual pursuits.