Uprising novel review: Sex workers fight back on floating brothel island

Radical hope and rage drive a new novel about sex workers on a remote island facing rising waters. In Tahmima Anam’s "Uprising," a community of women and children trapped in a Bangladeshi brothel island fight for a better life. The story opens with a chorus of child protagonists declaring, “Yes, you *will* leave this place. This story *will* save your life.” Anam, a journalist, visited the real “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh. Her novel is set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea.” There, daughters watch their mothers trapped in sex work. “We knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies,” they say. A cruel woman named Amma controls everyone. She was once sold into sex trafficking herself. The children understand that their mothers “are not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them.” The island’s first lesson is harsh: No one is coming to save you. And living there changes you, as surely as the rising tides. The novel explores how imagination can become action, and how solidarity can be forged in desperate conditions.