The opening scene of Saad Omar Khan’s debut novel, Drinking the Ocean is easily familiar to city dwellers, yet is meaningfully resonant. On a summer’s day, and completely by chance, Murad spots Sofi at Dundas Square after not having seen her for several years. Preoccupied with the child she guides through the crowd, Sofi is unaware of Murad’s presence, and this crystallized moment of seeing and not seeing sets off a chain of reminiscences for Murad that carry the reader into the time before: before Murad and Sofi met, then during their encounters as graduate students in London, England, and finally their lives after returning to Toronto. This theme of not meeting, or the accident of meeting somewhere else, or how the people we meet affect us in ways we can’t predict, runs through Drinking the Ocean to pose larger questions about emptiness, faith, and the very nature of human connection.
Beneath the surface of a quasi-romantic narrative between Murad and Sofi, a deeper subtext emerges as the almost-parallel lives of these protagonists unfold. Both Murad and Sofi have roots in Islam and in Pakistan, and both have experienced living in different places before their families finally settled in Toronto. Both deal or have dealt with challenging life experiences – mental health issues for Murad, grief following the death of her brother for Sofi. But they’re also foils – Murad grew up in a religious Muslim family but by the time he meets Sofi, he is struggling with his faith; “because I figured all I needed to do was to pray and that alone would protect me. It didn’t, and I stopped praying”, he tells Sofi in England. Sofi, on the other hand describes her upbringing as only loosely affiliated with Islam. “I didn’t come from faith. We never paid attention to it as a family. I wasn’t an atheist, but I wasn’t religious in any meaningful sense” she tells Murad, and goes on to describe how she is changing: “I’ve been more attracted to the spiritual life, even if I don’t fit in perfectly to the spiritual life” she confesses.
The novel’s depiction of characters struggling with their faith in Islam is both specific yet broad enough to be recognizable for anyone who has come from a family background where faith and culture may be inexorably intertwined.
The protagonists’ journeys, both away from and toward faith, are easily recognizable by any number of readers, as they speak to much larger questions of the human search for meaning. The emptiness Murad and Sofi recognize in one another leads to one of the novel’s central questions: whether or not these characters can fill that emptiness with faith and love for the divine, or for one another. For Murad, it’s clear that “The deeper he travelled toward her, the more liberated he felt from himself”, while for Sofi, it’s the realization of her faith, on her own terms, that will come to fill that emptiness.
Beyond a compelling and intriguing story, one thing I very much appreciated in this novel was that Urdu terms were neither translated nor italicized. As someone who incorporates Calabrese in my work, I found this decision left me with a much more holistic and authentic reading of the world Khan describes in and through his characters. In addition, the novel’s depiction of characters struggling with their faith in Islam is both specific yet broad enough to be recognizable for anyone who has come from a family background where faith and culture may be inexorably intertwined. In this sense, the specificity of both religion and culture here lend themselves to a universal reading for anyone who knows what it is like to speak and exist in one language and way of being at home and another in public, and/or to be raised within or adjacent to the bounds of a religious and cultural tradition with which one may or may not choose to identify later in life.
There is so much more to be said about this gorgeous, thoughtful debut novel by Saad Omar Khan, but suffice to say that Drinking the Ocean offers a rich and pensive journey from which readers will find themselves moved and transformed.
Saad Omar Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents and lived in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and South Korea before emigrating to Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and has completed a certificate in Creative Writing from the School of Continuing Studies (University of Toronto) where he was a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award (2010 and 2011) and for the Marina Nemat Award (2012). In 2019, he was longlisted for the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025 and other publications. Saad’s debut novel Drinking the Ocean was published by Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn in 2025. He lives outside of Toronto and is currently working on his second novel.
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn (May 6th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 288 pp
ISBN: 9781998408177
Renée M. Sgroi (she/her) has published two poetry collections, life print, in points (erbacce-press) and In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions). A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers, the Canadian Authors Association, The Ontario Poetry Society, and an Amherst Artists and Writers Affiliate, Renée is also a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.
