Playing Games, Huma Qureshi’s fourth book and first novel, could have shared a title with her 2021 short story collection, Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love. Told through the lives of two sisters, Hana and Mira, born two years apart, this poignant and impressionistic book about the often blurred boundaries between life and literature asks what – and why – we hold back from those who know us best.
Hana wants to be a mother but is stuck in a failing marriage. Mira wants to be a writer but is stuck with writer’s block, living in a shitty flatshare. The two sisters’ personalities and life trajectories could not be further apart: one a successful divorce lawyer, the other a university dropout. Their relationship is increasingly fraught, following the death of their mother 11 years ago. They share a birthday, but a lack of understanding widens the space between them. Hana and Mira are “as lost as each other, both wanting things that are out of reach”.
Mira is determined to enter a playwriting prize, but her work in progress, Pavements – about a woman in her 30s whose life has not turned out the way she expected – is going nowhere. Shortly after writing the first scene, she realises the lead character is her. So she’s been “trying hard ever since to make stuff up, in order for it to be less predictable, more original”.
Now Mira is desperate. It’s taken her four months to write two scenes and the deadline is looming. Something shifts when she overhears a fight between Hana and her husband, Samir. Something her sister says – “I don’t want to go to fucking Paris” – sticks. Mira can’t stop thinking about how unhappy Hana is, even when she says she’s not. That sentence leads to an image, which leads to an idea.
At Mira’s playwriting workshop, participants play a game, “making up events at random and then seeing what the knock-on effects might be”. What are the knock-on effects of writing about the breakdown of your sister’s marriage? What are the ethics of “taking” – borrowing? stealing? – from someone’s life and putting it on stage? Qureshi uses the process of playwriting within the novel to raise important questions about the inner workings of the writer, as she asks where stories are really born: within us or in the world around us.
The novel is highly readable and relatable. While some of the plot points feel predictable, by the time the tables turn, we are less invested in how and why the sisters got where they did, and more by where they have found themselves, and each other. When Hana attends the staging of Mira’s play, she walks out midway. “So all this time you’ve been writing, you’ve been making fun of me? Playing games with my life?”
Playing Games is about characters in uncomfortable situations who say and do uncomfortable things. It is filled with hard decisions and harsh truths, but also the softer and more tender moments of life and familial love. Above all, sisterhood is front and centre. “If you just come back,” says Mira, “watch the rest of it, you’d see. The actors, they change, it’s meaningful, it’s something bigger than just – .” Qureshi shows that relationships break all the time, but it’s how we piece ourselves back together that matters.
For Mira, “a play is a moment that lasts, until it no longer does. And when it’s gone the people watching are left with only a lingering feeling in the air, like the fragrance of a perfume as someone walks away.” After reading Playing Games, there’s a similar lingering feeling – of the bond between two sisters, which can be bent, but not broken.
• Playing Games by Huma Qureshi is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
