The book Sarah Jessica Parker is obsessed by

The first thing you need to know: actress and producer Sarah Jessica Parker is taking on the literary world this summer with the launch of her own imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The venture is a chance for voracious reader Parker to give a home to the stories she finds most captivating.

The second thing you need to know: Parker is launching the imprint on June 12 with A Place For Us, the debut novel from 27-year-old American writer Fatima Farheen Mirza. “It is a story about a search for identity and what it is to be a person of faith,” says Parker. “It’s also about love and forgiveness. It’s a deeply moving, extraordinary achievement by a young writer.”

A Place For Us grapples with what it means to be Muslim in America today, although, as its author stresses on the phone, this was not a concept she intended to explore: “If I had, I would have buckled under that pressure. I started it eight years ago, so I hadn’t been thinking of my own identity in that way – I was me. But now, as things in the world have shifted, Islamophobia has become a much more painfully felt reality, so the book has taken on a different layer of meaning.”

For Mirza, the way in which memories (your own and other people’s) can come to define you, and our limited ability to understand what motivates our loved ones, is fascinating. “To me, the most exciting territory of fiction is that distance between people,” she says. “How little we can understand what it’s like to be another person unless we are occupying their point of view. So the novel, through the different perspectives, charts that gulf between people who have known each other their whole life.”