10/30/2025
A wonderful review of Saad Omar Khan's Drinking the Ocean from Junction Reads, where Saad will be appearing this Sunday, November 2nd.
BOOK REVIEW
Drinking The Oceanomar.khan
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When Murad sees Sofi for the first time since a chance encounter at a wedding years earlier, his heart opens to reveal the empty place where he had hidden his deep love, where he had tried to hide Sofi away. Seeing her triggers memories of the short but intense time they spent together in London. We’re then given Sofi’s life, her experiences of loss, her brother’s death, of her parents’ divorce, of searching for someone who might take her away from death.
We’re offered both Murad and Sofi’s perspectives on a love destined to be unrequited, if not completely unexplored. With striking, poetic, and deeply spiritual language, Khan gives us a love story, but also a life story, one that considers our deep connection to family, to oneself and to God, a story that asks, how do we continue to move forward? The novel explores mental illness, loneliness and grief with heartbreaking accuracy.
There is an emptiness we all carry, and while many of us try to fill it with love, faith, experiences and more, it is something we all share. Loneliness isn’t found in aloneness, but in the deep losses we each experience at some point in our lives. For Sofi, it is the space she holds for her dead brother, for Murad, it is the space he keeps empty for Sofi and his struggle with depression. Perhaps bigger than the question of how do we move forward, is how do we hold all the emptiness, the spaces that can never be filled and still seek happiness? Reading DRINKING THE OCEAN, I am left feeling optimistic, that with connection to one another or to God, there is hope, and the potential to find peace and happiness for all of us.
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