Samira Ahmed Books In Order

Publication Order of Amira & Hamza Books

Publication Order of Ms. Marvel: Beyond the Limit Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Samira Ahmed is a published author. She was born in Bombay in the heart of India but grew up in the town of Batavia, Illinois. She remembers her whole home smelling constantly like spices, fried onions, and potpourri. She liked the Midwest so much that she stayed there and currently resides there, although she has lived other places. Ahmed spent time living in New York City, Vermont, and Kauai, where she spent twelve months trying to hunt down the world’s most perfect mango.

She graduated from the University of Chicago and used her degree to teach English and taught high school level English to students for seven years. In that time, she also put in a lot of hard work that resulted in the creation of 70 small high schools in N.Y.C. With a strong English background, it may be no surprise that Ahmed eventually ventured into writing and becoming a published author!

Besides writing, Ahmed also did her fair share in the fight to have dollars to fund public schools in New York State fairly. Ahmed has appeared in such publications as the New York Daily News, New York Times, and NBC, NY1, Fox News, NPR, and BBC radio. Samira Ahmed has had the pleasure of her poetry and nonfiction work appear in such literary publications as the Fern, Entropy, Jaggery Lit, and Claudius Speaks. She is represented by Eric Smith from P.S. Literacy.

She is the author of the novel Love, Hate, & Other Filters. This fictional novel features the main character of Maya Aziz. She is a young girl with the whole world before her, but being of a certain cultural descent with Indian parents who have expectations, she feels a lot of pressure and like she is caught between two worlds: the traditional one of her parents and heritage and the modern world of her dreams that she feels is waiting for her in New York.

If you loved the works of Jacqueline Woodson, Adam Silvera, or Angie Thomas, you’ll love this intriguing fictional novel by Samira Ahmed. This debut novel finds Maya torn between following her own path and trying to remain true to the expectations of her parents. Her parents are very traditional Indian parents and see her as their classic good Indian daughter.

Maya does everything she can to please her parents, but she’s wondering if following what they want is ever going to pay off for her. If her parents had everything their way, she would be attending school at a college that was really close to their Chicago home in the suburbs and of course getting the best grades possible. Not only would her studies be important to her, but if all of her parents’ wildest dreams came true, Maya would be getting straight A’s in all of her classes and finding a Muslim boy to date.

Her mother would really love for her to find a nice and older Muslim boy to date and hopefully eventually marry. But not only would she have to find him and successfully date him, she would have to run him by her mother to see if she thought he was suitable. It’s a nightmare of the tallest order, and Maya doesn’t see any of her friends and their parents demanding that they find a nice boy to marry. They’re just expected to do well in classes and be normal teenagers and don’t carry the same cultural demands or wishes that she does.

Maya isn’t so sure that her mother’s plan is the one she ultimately wants to follow. Her mother’s dreams are pretty clear, and Maya knows what her mother would want her to do. But Maya has dreams of her own, and they are a lot different from what she thinks her mother would want. Maya wants more than anything to be able to go off to film school and live on her own in New York City, the center of the universe, as it were.

That already seems like it’s going to incur a fair amount of conflict between Maya and her mother. Maya desperately wants to join the world of art and learn everything that she can about movies, directing, writing, and film. It seems like a great experience to go off to the east coast and get out of Chicago for a while. And while it would be great for her mother if she met a nice Muslim boy while she was out there, Maya has her eye on a different someone entirely already.

Maya has feelings for a boy that she has known for a while. While they have been familiar ever since grade school, her elementary crush is coming into her orbit more and more at school. This is definitely going to mess with her parents’ intentions for her to find someone from her own culture that she can ultimately marry and have children with.

But while Maya is busy and preoccupied with dreaming about what she’s going to do for college and the guy she’s crushing on, the real world may just find a way to seep in yet and ruin everything. Like it or not, Maya still lives in a world where hate and racism exist. When a horrible crime happens hundreds of miles away, it’s the last thing that she expects and the consequences of this one act turns Maya’s life upside down in the course of a single instant.

Just like that, the community that she thought she knew changes considerably. It seems that the people that she knew have been taken over by aliens as classmates and even neighbors start to be consumed with strong emotions like fear, which leads to other emotions like anger and hatred.

In the end, Maya must find herself and stay true to the things that she believes in because life is short and we only get so much of it. Can Maya find out where it is that she belongs? Pick up the riveting novel Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed to see for yourself!