The First Jasmines
A story of silence and survival.
31 July 2025
Paperback / 9781914221248
ebook / 9781914221255
248 pages
East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.
Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.
As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.
Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.
‘A haunting, lyrical debut, as tender as it is brutal … Saima Begum takes the reader into the darkest depths of human nature and leads them back towards the faintest crack of light and hope. A brave, beautifully written novel.’
— Shahnaz Ahsan, author of The Jackfruit Chronicles and Hashim & Family
‘Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines is a brave and powerful novel about unspeakable wartime horrors. If the story does not break your heart, her prose will.’
— Sorayya Khan, author of We Take Our Cities With Us, City of Spies, Five Queen’s Road and Noor
‘A tender and compassionate tale of love and family, of sisterhood and solidarity, of dreams and survival and all the ways in which they shift shapes in the face of pain and brutality. Heartbreaking and powerful. A wonderful read.’
— Silmy Abdullah, author of Home of the Floating Lily
‘Lyrical and stunning in its prose, The First Jasmines gently yet powerfully leads us from the macro narratives of war and wartime sexual violence into its intimate terrain—relational fractures, quiet survival, and the lasting scars of the violence of 1971—making it a must-read.’
— Anam Zakaria, author of 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India