Evie and Maryam's Family Tree - Winner of the Waterstones Best Book for Younger Readers 2026

Autorentext
Janeen grew up in Florida, a place she loves and hates in equal measure, and now lives in London with her partner and three chaotic, incredible children. She's half-Pakistani, half-New Yorker, a lapsed lawyer, teacher, Muslim and Catholic. She's passionate about creating characters that are many things at once -- because she knows she's not alone in being a tangled mass of identities, always changing. When she's not writing, she's advocating for an education system that gives every kid a fair chance.

Klappentext

Evie and Maryam are in the same class at school, uneasily thrown together at the start of a new term as they start a project together looking into their family trees. The two girls don't think they have much in common - Maryam feels like an outsider, and Evie thinks Maryam is a bit odd. But when the two girls each find the same mysterious folder containing documents in a secret language that belong to their grandmothers, they discover their ties go back two generations, all the way to India, to partition, and to two best friends who inspired each other more than they ever know. A beautifully told historical family-based exploration of identity, inheritance, difference and friendship.

Zusammenfassung
The evocative and moving story of two very different girls in contemporary London who discover a family connection stretching back over 100 years before in the faraway country of India, at a tumultous time in its history; friendships spanning the centuries.