A Debut Novelist Takes On Islamophobia

NOVEL INSPIRATION: Maya, the main character in Samira Ahmed’s debut, “Love, Hate & Other Filters” — which hit the young adult list two weeks ago and is still selling briskly — is a Muslim Indian-American teenager and budding documentary filmmaker struggling to balance her own dreams with the expectations of her immigrant parents. She also must confront some terrifying Islamophobia, just as Ahmed herself once did. “My first experience with Islamophobia was during the Iran hostage crisis,” Ahmed says, describing how a man began hurling obscenities at her. “I was a young child. I was stunned, truly frozen. I had never heard that kind of language, had never had that kind of hate directed at me. It was a shattering moment, an event that changed my worldview.” She adds: “That is part of what I wanted to capture in ‘Love, Hate & Other Filters’ — that moment when a young person’s life is shattered by an event that has nothing to do with them.” Maya’s main narrative is shot through with a secondary tale, an unfolding act of domestic terrorism. “That story was inspired by two very specific references,” Ahmed explains, “the interstitial chapters in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in terms of craft and structure, and a line from ‘In Cold Blood,’ by Truman Capote: ‘Presently, the car crept forward.’ That inspired the tone, the tension I wanted to capture.”

DARK STAR: As you can tell from her novel, “The Hazel Wood,” a fantasy that features a 17-year-old drifter and enters the young adult list at No. 3, Melissa Albert read a lot of fairy tales as a child. “The ones I loved best included ‘The 12 Dancing Princesses,’ which is the closest the classic fairy-tale canon comes to portal fantasy,” she says. “Also ‘The Juniper Tree,’ which mixes up filicide, madness, cannibalism and revenge into fairy-tale Grand Guignol, and ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ which I love best in retellings that work at expunging the whiff of Stockholm syndrome from the romance.” The frightening side of fairy tales always appealed to her: “Being afraid of a wicked queen or a robber bridegroom is delicious and distant, miles away from, say, watching a slasher flick.” Albert says she was also influenced by Yeats. “I took the book’s title from the first, haunting line of Yeats’s wonderful poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ which is also my epigraph: ‘I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head.’ It’s the name of the grand, isolated estate belonging to my heroine’s grandmother, a self-mythologizing author of dark fairy tales.”