Successful Queries: Stephen Barr and “Land of No Regrets,” by Sadi Muktadir

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, we’ll look at a query by Sadi Muktadir for his debut novel Land of No Regrets, recently published by HarperCollins Canada and Hanover Square Press.

Sadi Muktadir (Photo credit: Alex Chen)

Sadi Muktadir is a writer from Toronto. His short stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, the Humber Literary Review, Blank Spaces, The New Quarterly, and other places. He is a two-time finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence and twice shortlisted for the Malahat Open Season Awards for best short fiction. He works as an Editor, and continues to read, write, travel and grow as a cook. Find him online at @sadi_muktadir on both Twitter and Instagram.

Original Query

Dear Stephen Barr,

My literary fiction work, THE GHOSTS OF NORTHUMBERLAND, is a story about four South Asian Muslim youth coming of age at a Madrasa in the Canadian wilderness. Their refusal to bow to any community’s pressure for a pious life leads to a spirited rebellion, and then their catastrophic doom. The story takes place across an eventful school year, and concerns the boys’ trials and tribulations as they rebel against their impending future as stalwart religious leaders of their community. These four boys are all second generation immigrants from the Muslim diaspora, and finding themselves at a Madrasa in the wilderness, grapple with finding an identity that is truly their own. The manuscript is complete at roughly 80,000 words, and has been professionally revised and edited.

THE GHOSTS OF NORTHUMBERLAND takes place at Al Haque Islamic Academy, a Madrasa in the barrens. Stuck somewhere between Durham and Northumberland County, the four youth are pulled out of their public schools for various reasons, some within their control, like behavior and grades, and some out of their control, like their community’s needs and their immigrant parents’ fears. The story follows Nabil, the inquisitive, earnest narrator who yearns for his past life full of friends, baseball, video games and comic books. Very quickly, he falls into the company of Maaz and Nawaaz, who harbor a dark secret about Madrasa friendships. The three of them are soon joined by Farid, a new transfer student and wild soul who is always scheming up heists to remind them all of their feelings. Together, the four youth rebel against Al Haque’s unjust and cruel rule, led by the four Heart Attacks, teachers who are so cruel and violent they instill a heart attack upon sight. One day in the attic of the Madrasa, they find a mysterious journal written by a girl named Cynthia, who was a student there decades ago when the building was an all girl’s Catholic boarding school. Reading the journal shows them how similar they are to someone from another time, another faith, another race and another sex, and fuels their rebellion over the ensuing months as they sneak out of the Madrasa, explore their repressed sexuality, break into the kitchen at night and buy a car to begin planning their eventual escape. However, just as their heists and rebellion continue to grow larger and more heinous, so too, does their guilt. The time spent at the Madrasa, learning, listening through vivid sermons and witnessing one student’s piety and devotion to a virtuous life takes its toll on the boys. Torn between this life and the next, in a land that is both theirs and not theirs, they continue down a calamitous path across the dreary and snowy landscape, courting destruction without regret.

My name is Sadi Muktadir and I’m a writer currently squandering my life working in an office downtown. I was born and raised in Toronto, my parents having emigrated from Bangladesh for a better life. With this work, I’m attempting to share a coming-of-age tale many second generation Muslim immigrants experience growing up in the West. This is a story that many North Americans are not aware of, and I want to share with readers how many of us are continuing to come of age here. I have been published in a number of journals, including Joyland Magazine, the Humber Literary Review, Ricepaper Magazine, and other places. I was recently named a finalist for Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence in 2019. I was also named the 3rd place winner of the 2018 Humber Literary Review’s Emerging Writer Story Contest, and the winner of the 2017 ‘What’s Your Story Contest’ for Toronto. When I’m not writing I can be found eating my way across the city, testing the limits of the human stomach. I can be followed on twitter @sadi_muktadir and can be reached by email at sadimuktadir@gmail.com or by phone at 647-280-8658. I’ve pasted the first ten pages of my manuscript below and I hope you’re intrigued by my story!

Thank you for this opportunity!

Regards,
Sadi Muktadir

Check out Sadi Muktadir’s Land of No Regrets here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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What Stephen Barr liked about the query:

Sadi’s query arrived in the spring of 2020, so I probably read it in the middle of the night (the daylight hours being spent with my three-year-old, whose school was closed like all the others) and I bet it woke me up like a slap in the face.

It’s really that second sentence, the mildness of the phrase “spirited rebellion” right next to the almost absurd “catastrophic doom.” That easy mingling of the everyday with the apocalyptic ended up being all over Sadi’s novel, in the writing and in the story, and I think it’s what makes his query so striking…there’s undeniable voice, even within the formal structures of a query and synopsis. It’s the directness, too…there’s not a lot of preamble, you know? Sadi says hi and then he’s offered the genre and main characters and arc and setting all within the first sentence. He doesn’t open with a referral or a remark about why he’s querying me as opposed to another agent at Writers House, but the way he assertively gets his arms around so much of the book makes it hard to turn away…somehow you’re already invested in these boys (and then once you know they’re doomed, well, you have to know if there’s somehow still room for hope!).

Sadi also does a bang-up job of expanding from the “let me get your attention” mini-synopsis in the opening paragraph to the second more detailed synopsis without repeating himself, which makes you feel the book must be abundant, with no shortage of invention…he re-introduces the main characters with their face and names this time, and all these volatile components get tagged, a “dark secret,” a “wild soul,” “repressed sexuality,” “heinous” efforts to rebel colliding with spiritual guilt, and this snowball-rolling-down-hill feeling that culminates in “courting destruction without regret.” Talk about sticking the landing!

Then the volatility carries through into Sadi’s bio, too…he’s a writer, first and foremost, but he’s “squandering [his] life working in an office downtown.” It doesn’t read like a complaint, though (writers complaining about their day jobs in their query letters is incredibly common, believe it or not)…it’s not woe-is-me or self-deprecating, it just reads like something people should know about Sadi if they want to know Sadi. He recognizes he’s meant for more, which sure sounds like the struggle his novel’s built around…so you can trust that he knows what he’s writing about.

Finally, the phrase “testing the limits of the human stomach” is just the cherry on top, I suppose…a writer writing at every turn. When I eventually read Sadi’s novel, I’d have to take breaks to either bury my head in my hands to despair over what was happening to the boys, or to laugh for a minute straight, sounding more and more unhinged, the way you get with your friends in the room. When I look back at his query, I just think “Of course.”

*****

Stephen Barr

Stephen Barr is a senior literary agent at Writer House, where he started out as an intern in the winter of 2008 after graduating from UCLA with a degree in something. He represents a broad stripe of authors across all genres, and is also the author of The Upside Down Hat, illustrated by Gracey Zhang, which was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, son, and daughter. 

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