During the Pakistani army occupation of Bangladesh during that country's war of liberation, soldiers captured women - many young village girls - and set up camps in which they were turned into sexslaves, chained and systematically raped. In 1971, after nine months of atrocities, compared by international observers to the Nazi reign in Poland, Bangladesh ceded from Pakistan but was left with thousands of women impregnated by the enemy.  While Bangladesh's first leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, named the violated women "birangona" - heroines - and said that families should not deem them shameful but should welcome them home, he also declared that their war babies were not wanted. This harrowing point in her country's history - largely forgotten by the world at large - is the starting point for Tahmima anam's second novel, The Good Muslim.  "It was a terrible contradiction," she says. "These women literally contained the seed of the oppressive foreign army. So what followed the rape camps were abortion camps, tacitly sanctioned by the Government or run by aid agencies, which got rid of the problem." In Bangladesh's pressing desire to cleanse itself, to start its national history afresh, many babies were adopted abroad: at a book tour in america, a woman introduced herself to anam and said that she was the product of such a rape.  and yet The Good Muslimendeavours to examine how horrific events affect the dynamic of a single family. It centres on Maya, a doctor who tries to assist the women victims of the war and her brother Sohail who, devastated by what he witnesses as a soldier when rescuing a girl from a rape camp, turns to fundamentalist Islam. Maya, returning home to Dhaka after many years, finds her mother's house transformed into a makeshift mosque and Sohail sending the son he refuses to have educated at an ordinary school to a madrasah.  It is a novel filled with secrets, experiences that are literally unspeakable, psychological wounds that refuse to heal because they are not exposed to fresh air.  It has taken Bangladesh 40 years to bring perpetrators of war crimes and collaborators with the Pakistan army to justice. The first tribunals will be conducted this year: arrests have been made. and anam believes that her country has suffered incalculably from not expurgating its pain through a truth-and-reconcilation process.  "People of that time are still alive today, in their sixties and seventies. I think it is really important for Bangladesh as a country to move on and deal with the trauma of the past and get some closure." anam, 35, grew up listening to endless tales of that period. Her grandfather, a prominent political dissident and satirist, narrowly escaped death in Pakistan's calculated scorched-earth massacre of 250 Bangladeshi journalists, artists and intellectuals four days before war officially ended. Her parents were both Marxist freedom fighters: they would tell stories of the humilations inflicted by occupying Pakistan, how soldiers stopped men in the street and told them to drop their trousers to prove that they were circumcised. The implication was that Bangladeshi Muslims were less "pure" because they were Bengalis and their country still contained many Hindus.  anam's upbringing was peripatetic because her father worked for the United Nations and her family lived in Paris, New York and Bangkok. She took her PhD at Harvard and her accent is american East Coast. Tiny and delicate of feature, she wears a traditional kurta - a loose shirt - with jeans and sandals, yet retains impeccable american grooming. She lived in Dhaka for only a few years in her late teens when her father, Mahfuz anam, returned to fulfill his dream of founding the English-language newspaper, the Daily Star. But she says that a sense of alienation - physical and psychological - has provided a helpful writer's distance from her homeland.  an anthropologist by training, she turned to fiction - to the relief of her parents who feared that she'd become an actress - after attending a creative writing class at Royal Holloway, London, taught by Sir andrew Motion, the former poet laureate.  Her first novel, a Golden age, which won the Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, depicted Sohail and Maya's childhood, and their mother's perilous efforts to assist freedom fighters by protecting their ammunition: it was based upon the life of anam's grandmother.  The state of Pakistan, as created by postwar partition, comprised two totally separate territories, East and West, 1,000 miles apart, with no common language or culture, only a shared religion. It appears to have been, as anam puts it, "an historical hack job" destined to fracture in two.  But the legacy of Bangladesh's history is more than scars and suffering. Bangladesh had a strain of Marxist atheism that entered the cultural DNa, to the benefit of its nation's women. "Boys and girls were thrown together through political activism and all the years leading up to the war, when they were on the streets and called each other comrade," anam says. "a lot of traditional barriers broke down. I have this theory that people who came out of that war skipped several steps in terms of women's rights."  Many, such as her own parents, had love marriages, not arranged matches, and the feminist movement is still strong in Bangladesh: anam's mother is a prominent campaigner.  and the country has had two women prime ministers.  "I grew up in a secular family," anam says. "My parents came out of a war that was about dividing Muslims, so many people killed in the name of Islam."  Yet in The Good Muslim, anam is careful not to present Sohail's journey to faith in a crude and reductive manner. His fundamentalism is not overtly political, more a retreat from the world. "I purposely didn't have him join an organised party. For me it was important to talk about how one man's conversion dismantles his intimate relationships." While Sohail does not tell his doctor sister to cover herself or leave her job, he hurts her deeply by rejecting their shared childhood, burning the books they once both loved.  While Pakistan is in ferment, Bangladesh is relatively stable after 15 years of military rule. Its Supreme Court recently reaffirmed its constitutional status as a secular nation. Extreme Islamic parties such has Jamaat-e-Islami have never gained mass support, indeed it was discredited by its collaboration with Pakistan in forming a militia that allegedly helped to identify victims and took part in the killings. The party has been partially dismantled since its leaders were arrested to stand trial in the forthcoming war tribunals. However, anam is nervous of the growing power of Saudi arabia, which funds universities and mosques, pushing home its fundamentalist Wahabi brand of political Islam.  When we turn to discussing a question that must tire all Muslim women writers, the issue of the burka and hijab, anam says that what interests her is that Bangladeshi women in their home country are not covering up in greater numbers: it is expat Muslims who champion the veil. "I was at my cousin's wedding and there were a lot of young girls from america," she recalls. "They were all wearing jeans and tops with headscarves. all of the local cousins were really shocked. They were asking why.  Because in Bangladesh, for the most part, urbanised, middle-class girls don't cover their heads. and those girls who came in from america were quite exotic."  anam, who has lived in London for seven years, recently married an american designer of electronic musical instruments, a son of Quakers, who she met at Harvard. The wedding was held in Bangladesh last year: "He loved visiting for the first time. We had an amazing wedding. He was embraced as the first white member of the family and he did a great job of fitting in."  It grieves her that Bangladesh's reputation is of a beleaguered nation, devastated by floods and poverty, a pitied victim state that no one would consider visiting for pleasure, despite its great beauty and great developmental leaps in recent years. But she wonders if she could ever live there again. Her parents try to lure her home, suggest it is her duty to work for the good of her homeland. But instead she enjoys a yearning, long-distance relationship interspersed with regular visits.  Her third novel, the final book in the trilogy about Sohail and Maya, will concern their family less and focus more on the consequences of global warming for Bangladesh, which is likely to lose 17 per cent of its land to flooding in the next 50 years, displacing 30 million people.  But she wonders if her next book could feature British characters. She is certainly deeply in love with English literature. I meet her having just attended a screening of the new movie version of Jane Eyre, and anam interrogates me keenly about it. Is the Rochester appropriate? Is the Jane too pretty? Nineteenth-century novels are deeply popular in the subcontinent, the restrictions of Victorian Englishwomen echoing those of many in traditional societies now. "People can relate to Jane Eyre's story so much even now in Bangladesh," she says. "The social conventions are very similar. But things are changing, albeit slowly."  The Good Muslim is published by Canongate on May 19 at ?16.99. To order it for ?15.29 inc p&p call 0845 2712134  asia House festival  Tahmima anam is appearing at the asia House Festival of asian Literature on May 12. The only festival in the UK dedicated to the celebration of writing about asia and asians, it is held in asia House, an 18th-century London townhouse that hosts cultural events throughout the year.  Reader offer  Times readers get concession rates to all Festival of asian Literature events. Bookings must be made by phone (020-7307 5454) or e-mail (enquiries@asiahouse.co.uk), quoting FaL555-Times offer.  Times readers are also offered 50 per cent off annual membership of asia House.  applications by phone or e-mail by May 31. Members are entitled to the Friends' ticket rate (usually half price) for all events, including festival events.  festivalofasianliterature.com  Rising stars of asian writing  adrienne Loftus Parkins, director of asia House Literature, picks five female authors to watch  Sonia Faleiro was born in Goa, studied in Edinburgh and now lives in the US and has contributed to aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India (Vintage) and reported for Tehelka, India Today and Elle India. Her first nonfiction book, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World o