ISLAMIC STATES OF AMERICA

In Riaz’s thriller, a government agent attempts to find the son he lost in the aftermath of the United States’ transformation into an Islamic nation.

Jamal Stone has seen his country rent asunder: After an Islamic terrorist organization engulfed America in violent conflict, China refused to buy U.S. treasury bonds, sending the economy into a death spiral. Now, the nation—renamed the Islamic States of America and ruled by a Muslim caliphate—is divided into two warring parts: the West State, which is a stable Islamic land, and the East State, where American patriots continue to resist, a terrifying future made bracingly plausible by the author. Initially, Stone had worked against the Islamic insurgency for the CIA; he was recruited because, as a Muslim, he could infiltrate the enemy. Exhausted by the toll of unending war, saddened over the deaths of his father and wife (the results of a drone strike and a riot, respectively), and anguished over the disappearance of his 3-year-old son, Khalil, he defected to the other side. However, his placid, domestic life in the West State—one in which he achieves a “level of tempered evenness”—is upended when he receives a video from an anonymous sender showing Khalil, now 10 years old. In dramatically gripping fashion, the author chronicles Stone’s dangerous mission to find Khalil in the East State, a sojourn that threatens the new life he has built working for the Islamic Ministry of Central Intelligence away from the front lines. Riaz’s dystopian setting is richly conceived; he convincingly constructs the peculiar contours of a new nation and its extraordinary cultural landscape. Stone’s marriage, a union arranged by the government after the death of his first wife, is explored with remarkable subtlety. As he searches for his son, Stone must come to grips with the true nature of his allegiance to the caliphate and the possibility that his peaceful existence is an “unrealistic aspiration or outright illusion.”

A provocative story as dramatically thrilling as it is thoughtful.