A Reaper at the Gates

Sabaa Tahir is a Pakistani American writer, well known for her YA series An Ember in the Ashes and for her novel All My Rage, published in 2022. Tahir grew up in a small town in the Mojave Desert, where she was often subjected to racist comments from her peers. While working at the Washington Post after college, she noticed that a majority of the stories were about people of color and their suffering as victims of atrocities. She was particularly taken by a story written by Emily Wax about Kashmiri husbands, brothers, and sons being disappeared by Indian security agents.

These experiences shaped Tahir’s writing. The first book in An Ember in the Ashes starts with Laia joining the Scholar Resistance, hoping to find information on her brother, Darin. The second book, A Torch Against the Night, and the third book, A Reaper at the Gates, were heavily influenced by the global refugee crises that were occurring in the wake of the Arab Spring at the time of Tahir’s writing. Influenced by these events, A Reaper at the Gates focuses heavily on The Duality of Oppression and Resistance, the brutality of war, and The Danger of Revenge as

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