Book Review: ‘Maryam & Son’ by Mirza Waheed

Book Title: Maryam & Son
Author: Mirza Waheed
Publisher: Context
Number of Pages: 264
ISBN: 9371977108
Date Published: Jan. 26, 2026
Price: INR 530

Book Review

Mirza Waheed’s “Maryam & Son” is less a thriller about a missing boy and more a quiet, heartbreaking portrait of a mother learning to live inside a question she can never fully answer. Maryam, a school‑chef and widow in East London, wakes to find her son’s bed empty one morning, and from that ordinary moment her world begins to cave in. The novel doesn’t shout; it slowly presses down on your chest, letting you feel the way fear, doubt, and public suspicion can turn a mother’s body into a prison.

What makes the book so emotionally raw is how it stays close to Maryam’s everyday life instead of chasing sensational headlines. She still goes to the shop, still argues with her sisters, still tries to look presentable, even as the police and officials circle her with half‑answers and worse. Mirza Waheed captures the way grief doesn’t always arrive as a storm; sometimes it arrives as a numbness, a habit of checking her phone, a habit of rehearsing excuses in her head, as if saying the right words could bring her son back or at least keep him from being labelled something monstrous.

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The relationship between Maryam and her son, Dil, is never fully there on the page, yet it feels painfully real. You see him in fragments—through childhood memories, through her guilt, through the way she defends him even when she suspects the worst. Mirza Waheed doesn’t let the reader slip into the easy comfort of “if only she had done this or that”; instead, he sits with the messy truth that a mother can love fiercely and still fail to know her child truly. That tension—between love and ignorance, between protection and responsibility—rattles around long after you put the book down.

Most moving of all is the way “Maryam & Son” holds together so many hard things: loneliness, surveillance, Islamophobia, and the quiet strength of ordinary women who keep breathing even when the world wants them to disappear quietly. Maryam is not a saint or a victim; she’s a woman who cooks school meals for strangers, who flirts awkwardly with neighbours, who sometimes wishes for a different life, who still wants to be desired and seen. In that tenderness laid bare, Mirza Waheed gives readers a deeply human story about what it costs a mother to love a child the world has already decided to hate.

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