The ever-surprising John Updikes twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Quran as expounded to him by a local mosques imamThe son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect in northern New Jersey Neither the world-weary depressed guidance counselor at Central High School Jack Levy nor Ahmads mischievously seductive black classmate Joryleen Grant succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese the threads of a plot gather around him with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security But to quote the Quran Of those who plot God is the best.
