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British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax of Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971 It is told from the perspective of a young widow separated from her children In his 2008 New York Times review the academic Michael Gorra doubts Anam’s commitment to historical accuracy He finds its discussions of sex too frank for the time period in which it is set; its author too entangled in the mind of her protagonist and ‘her own omniscient narrative voice’ Laden with sexist assumptions of how Bangladeshi women ought to be depicted in literature, pretensions about women’s roles in political histories, and prescriptions for how women should write, Gorra’s review is a revelatory case study in how women’s literature, both at large and from Bangladesh in particular, has been received over the past decade ‘If a writer can’t be trusted about small things,’ Gorra asks, ‘can we trust her about large ones?’   It is precisely the small things, told in plainspoken prose, that give insight into larger issues of sexuality, faith and freedom in Hellfire, the debut novel by fellow British-Bangladeshi author Leesa Gazi, newly translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya A playwright, filmmaker and cultural organizer, Gazi wrote Hellfire while adapting Anam’s A Golden Age from English to Bengali for the stage She drew from her advocacy work with Bangladeshi survivors of wartime rape (who are known as birongona in Bangladesh) to reflect on how women are confined and constricted, their agency stultified, and their fates predestined Hellfire’s brisk pacing hews closely to the textures of a psychological thriller (a vestige, perhaps, of its original format as a weekly serialized story presented on the website artsbdnews24) It is also stylistically innovative, flitting between multiple temporalities and perspectives without the separation of chapters – a formal demonstration of how, as secrets get buried and memories repressed, gendered traumas are cycled through generations   Hellfire opens on the morning of 16 November 2007 in Dhaka Lovely, who lives with her sister Beauty – under the tight watch of their mother Farida