It takes many different forms, which you see as you work your way to the end of both of my books. I use that conventional form to explore two central themes in my books: the notion of identity-what it’s constructed of, what it means to us, how we are defined by or constrained by it-and the notion of justice. In both of your novels, you use a conventional “whodunit” plot structure-a mysterious death investigated by a detective and his partner. And in The Language of Secrets, I’m writing about a terror plot in Toronto but also about the beauty of Arabic, Urdu and English poetry. In The Unquiet Dead, I’m able to tell a story about the genocide in Bosnia even though it’s framed as a murder mystery in Canada. I’m very comfortable with mystery storytelling as a narrative structure, and I find it engages the reader quickly.
I use that form to explore stories about history, culture, art, politics, religion and the places where all these things intersect. It gives me the ability to let my characters grow over the course of several books. I’m a lifelong fan of the mystery genre, and the crime novel is the form most suited to the stories I want to tell. If that’s your goal, then why crime novels? It is important to me to do work that I think is humanizing.” Whether as a lawyer or a writer, she says, “I’ve really been doing the same thing all my life through different paths, and that is telling the stories that matter and representing voices that are often silenced or marginalized. A former immigration attorney in Toronto, Khan holds multiple degrees in law, including a doctorate in international human rights law that focused on the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia that began while she was a student at the University of Ottawa, Ontario. “Writing is my first love,” emphasizes Khan, whose other passion is not far behind: justice. “I think I love writing because my parents taught me to venerate the written word. “My family has always loved art and literature and especially poetry,” explains Khan, whose parents were raised in Pakistan. Although Khan is newly published as a novelist, a black filing cabinet in her office overflows with poems, short stories, plays, musicals, journals, first drafts and even some abandoned novels she began writing from the time she was growing up in Toronto, Canada.