Selina Hossain’s Charcoal Portrait is a breathtaking novel about a war child’s search for his biological mother 25 years after a German couple adopted him in the wake of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Enriched with many subtexts – the tribal tea-garden workers’ dream of going back to their ancestral land, the history of tea in the Indian subcontinent, the 1971 War – this novel is an engrossing read. Charcoal Portrait is the English translation of her Bengali novel, Kathkoylar Chhobi.