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*Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016* Mirza Waheed's extraordinary new novel The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking love story set in war-torn Kashmir. In an ancient house in the city of Srinagar, Faiz paints exquisite Papier Mache pencil boxes for tourists. Evening is beginning to slip into night when he sets off for the shrine. There he finds the woman with the long black hair. Roohi is prostrate before her God. She begs for the boy of her dreams to come and take her away. Roohi wants a love story. An age-old tale of love, war, temptation, duty and choice, The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking tale of a what might have been, what could have been, if only....
A CrimeReads Best of 2023 Notable Selections A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Thriller of 2023 “[A] a powerful tale of guilt and betrayal…Tell Her Everything…is about a doctor who betrays the principle of empathy. But it is through the empathic act of writing – of putting pen to paper and reckoning with those who have suffered at his hands – that he succeeds in recovering his humanity and coming back from his own living death…plotted with great care.” —The Guardian "Tell Her Everything is a layered recital of intricately woven hauntings, decisions, and confessions...[A] story that is at once haunting, tender, and gripping." — Chicago Review of Books A doctor working in a prosper...
Four teenage boys, who used to spend their afternoons playing cricket, or singing Bollywood ballads down by the river, have disappeared one by one, to cross into Pakistan and join the movement against the Indian army. A tale tinged with grief, 'The Collaborator' describes the heart of a war that is all too real.
'With flashes of brilliance, tenderness and fury, Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator does what fiction should. It makes you listen' Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone. Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and turned militant to bear arms against the Indian army. He would like to join them - but he cannot. Instead, put in an impossible position by an Indian army Captain, he must cross into the shadowlan...
This is the memoir of a remarkable woman, Begum Khurshid Mirza, the daughter of Sheikh Abdullah and Waheed Jahan Begum, the founders of Aligarh Women's College. An intimate portrait of an upper class Muslim family in India and Pakistan from the early part of the twentieth century until the recent past, this narrative is much more than an account of Khurshid Mirza s personal life. It spans the years from 1857 to 1983 and provides an insight into the social conditions of Indian Muslims, the state of Muslim women s education, and the transition to Pakistan, while illuminating Khurshid Mirza s rich and varied life as an actor, activist, radio and TV artist, a writer, a devoted daughter, wife and mother.
In the foothills of a mountain range in northern Pakistan is a beautiful orchard. Swallows wheel and dive silently over the branches, and the scent of jasmine threads through the air. Pomegranates hang heavy, their skins darkening to a deep crimson. Neglected now, the trees are beginning to grow wild, their fruit left to spoil on the branches. Many miles away, a frail young man is flung out of prison gates. Looking up, scanning the horizon for swallows in flight, he stumbles and collapses in the roadside dust. His ravaged body tells the story of fifteen years of brutality. Just one image has held and sustained him through the dark times - the thought of the young girl who had left him dumbstruck with wonder all those years ago, whose eyes were lit up with life. A tale of tenderness in the face of great and corrupt power, In The Orchard, The Swallows is a heartbreaking novel written in prose of exquisite stillness and beauty
A riveting novel about the remarkable life—and many loves—of author H. G. Wells H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, was one of the twentieth century's most prophetic and creative writers, a man who immersed himself in socialist politics and free love, whose meteoric rise to fame brought him into contact with the most important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time, but who in later years felt increasingly ignored and disillusioned in his own utopian visions. Novelist and critic David Lodge has taken the compelling true story of Wells's life and transformed it into a witty and deeply moving narrative about a fascinating yet flawed man. Wells ...
Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, the second best runner in Year 7, races through his new life in England with his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat around him. Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of city life, from the bewildering array of Haribo sweets, to the frightening, fascinating gang of older boys from his school. But his life is changed forever when one of his friends is murdered. As the victim's nearly new football boots hang in tribute on railings behind fluorescent tape and a police appeal draws only silence, Harri decides to act, unwittingly endangering the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to keep them safe.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize *Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees, a Reese's Book Club pick. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her. Tequila Leila's memories bring ...
Kashmiri Life Narratives takes as its central focus writings -- memoirs, non-fictional and fictional Bildungsromane -- published circa 2008 by Kashmiris/Indians living in the Valley of Kashmir, India or in the diaspora. It offers a new perspective on these works by analyzing them within the framework of human rights discourse and advocacy. Literature has been an important medium for promoting the rights of marginalized Kashmiri subjects within Indian-occupied Kashmir, successfully putting Kashmir back on the global map and shifting discussion about Kashmir from the political board rooms to the international English-language book market. In discussing human rights advocacy through literature, this book also effects a radical change of perspective by highlighting positive rights (to enjoy certain things) rather than negative ones (to be spared certain things). Kashmiri life narratives deploy a language of pleasure rather than of physical pain to represent the state of having and losing rights.