Hollow Fires

Hollow Fires is a young adult contemporary crime thriller written by American author Samira Ahmed and published in 2022. Samira Ahmed is a New York Times bestselling author known for her work that centers Muslim protagonists and interrogates Islamophobia in the United States. Born in Mumbai, India, Ahmed taught high school and worked in political campaigns before becoming a novelist. Hollow Fires directly addresses contemporary anti-immigrant issues such as white supremacy, classism, and Islamophobic domestic terrorism, as well as the media’s power to both fight for justice and perpetuate or exacerbate injustice. 

This guide references the Little, Brown and Company 2022 First Hardcover edition of Hollow Fires.

Content Warning: The text includes violence against children, murder, hate speech, Islamophobic words and actions, suggestions of police violence, anti-Black words and actions, and racial slurs.

Plot Summary

Hollow Fires is a multi-point-of-view hybrid novel that uses a combination of first-person narration and in-world media (articles, posts, text messages, transcripts) to tell the story of Jawad Ali and Safiya Mirza. The novel spans approximately 19 months from Jawad Ali’s arrest in October 2021 to his murder investigation in January 2022 to the sentencing of his killers in May 2023. The story is organized as a frame, where Part I takes place in the present-day 2023 right before the sentencing, Parts II-VI take place in 2021 during the events of Jawad’s murder investigation, and Part VII ends back in the present-day after the sentencing. 

In October 2021, 14-year-old Jawad Ali makes a jet pack costume in makerspace club. He wears the costume to school, where his English teacher mistakes it for a bomb because Jawad is an American from Iraq. Jawad is arrested and cleared, but the media and his classmates nickname him Bomb Boy as a result. Around the same time, high school senior and school newspaper editor Safiya Mirza receives a threatening letter at her mosque from someone in London.

Jawad receives threatening text messages over the next few months, and in January 2022, gets into a car with someone and never returns home. Also in January, someone calling themselves Ghost Skin hacks Safiya’s column and posts a racist manifesto. A few days later, during a fire alarm, the same person paints a swastika on the side of Safiya’s school. Safiya begins an investigation with the other members of the paper. One day after Jawad’s disappearance, the police rule it a kidnapping and the search begins. Safiya believes that Jawad’s disappearance is connected somehow to the London letter, the Ghost Skin hack, and the painted swastika. She and the newspaper staff decide to investigate, despite warnings from their principal. 

For the next nine days, Safiya and her friends try to solve the Ghost Skin case while looking for Jawad. Richard Reynolds, co-captain of the swim and lacrosse teams at Safiya’s school, starts spending more time with her and asks her to the Winter Ball. Safiya also has a crush on Richard and appreciates his concern about Jawad’s case. In contrast, Safiya conflicts with Nate Chase, a boy at her school who seems to agree with Ghost Skin’s ideas. Safiya suspects that Nate may be Ghost Skin or may be responsible for Jawad’s disappearance. Throughout the search, Safiya is haunted by a voice begging her to find him. The voice pushes her to investigate Jackson Park, but the morning she plans to go, her parents’ store is vandalized with a racial slur. 

Returning to school after the vandalism, Safiya learns from Richard’s ex that he was in London at the time that Safiya’s mosque received the letter. Safiya starts to suspect that he’s been lying to her. Safiya follows the whispers to Jackson Park—a place Nate Chase regularly frequents—and finds Jawad’s body. The case becomes a murder investigation. Safiya and her friends, frustrated by the lack of progress in the police’s case, create the hashtag, #JusticeforJawad, to solicit anonymous tips online. Someone posts on Reddit about a rental car that matches the description of the car that took Jawad. Safiya follows the lead and discovers that Nate and Richard worked together to kill Jawad. She confronts Richard and is almost killed before one of her friends saves her. 

Sixteen months later, Nate and Richard are found guilty of first-degree murder and the murder is designated a hate crime. Safiya remains committed to sharing Jawad’s story and working for justice as a sophomore in journalism at Northwestern University. In the final pages of the story, Jawad’s ghost finds peace and moves on.