The Book I am going to review today is Hamid Baig’s debut novel, Little Maryam. The book I read was in an Ebook format and I liked the overall formatting of the book because most of the Ebooks I read feel like reading the PDF in an Epub format. However, coming to the business, Little Maryam by Hamid Baig deals with the theme of love and sacrifice and fortune. The central characters in the novel are Saadiq, who later on becomes a world-renowned doctor, and Maryam. Like the movies of Bollywood, they grow up together – playing, crying, laughing, sporting around and growing up to become the teenagers of the modern world who care not a hoot about the social norms and traditional setups.

The basic idea in the novel is given to be the love between these two which is not liked by the father of Maryam. Fortune favours him and Saadiq goes to jail for a murder is charged upon him. Maryam is married to someone else and Saadiq is left alone.

When fortune makes them meet for the second time, only after two decades and a little more, they are changed. Saadiq, who has become a famous, Nobel Prize winning doctor, is old and Maryam is also old but she loses her memory and forgets her husband and also forgets that she has a daughter. And all these add to their romance and they also marry each other. And thereafter, the real twist of the novel begins.

Apart from a lucrative and thrilling storyline, the novel also sports a very good plot. The curiosity of the readers makes the novel a real page-turner. As a reader, I always felt like knowing what might happen the next moment in the novel. Introduction of the characters has been done at appropriate times and at appropriate times, they vanish as well. So, you can say that the plot is very well constructed and the author has been successful in convincing his readers to read Little Maryam completely.

What seemed to be inappropriate in the novel was the over-centralisation of the novel on a single character and a limited resource. The novel is only about Saadiq if I am honest about my reading experience. The author has favoured him more than enough and tried to show him as a hero which he is not, at times. For instance, we all know, as readers, that the brawl at the Delhi lounge was because of Saadiq’s initial excitement, not because Salman’s. Still, the author might be interested in remaining focused on Saadiq only and not on any other character.

The conclusion of the novel is a little melodramatic or at least Anne makes it look like one. Otherwise, the novel is very apt for the contemporary readers and it does enchant with the convincing style of writing – the author is most often sure about what he is presenting to the readers and such confidence is very rare for a debutant!

You can also enjoy the novel if you haven’t read it as of yet. Click on the link below to go to Amazon India and buy this novel from there.

Little Maryam on Amazon – buy now

review by Rohit