Fiction writers often peel back the layers of their characters’ histories to make them more three-dimensional, realistic and intriguing. This technique opens a doorway into their hidden emotional lives and even allows them an opportunity to identify and address their traumas.

Poet, publisher and novelist Safinah Danish Elahi’s oeuvre also harbours a preoccupation with the past. However, her three novels don’t employ the motif in a clichéd manner, where scandalous revelations about characters overshadow their emotional and spiritual growth. Instead, turning the clock back to a bygone era serves as a clarion call, urging people to recognise their responsibilities to themselves and others.

In Eye on the Prize, fragile bonds remain intact because the characters choose to overlook an adolescent mistake in order to protect those who are vulnerable. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon explores the lingering echoes of a traumatic childhood tragedy in the life of two unlikely friends. As they deal with their dilemmas, the protagonists learn a valuable lesson about empathy and humanity.

Across time and space, four friends discover that the past is not something left behind — but something that shapes the present

Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light is built on a similar template, insofar as it offers yet another captivating exploration of how the past seeps into the present. Like her previous fictional offerings, Elahi’s third novel places the turmoil of a troubled girl at its epicentre.

Above all, this new work, like The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, adopts a multi-character perspective. However, each character’s viewpoint is filtered through a detached third-person voice, rather than the immersive first-person perspective employed in Elahi’s sophomore novel. This stylistic shift constructs a barrier between the characters and readers, thereby lending an aura of mystery to the narrative.

A quick glance at the back cover text promises a poignant tale about adolescent friendships that evolve as time, distance and dark secrets threaten old affinities. The plot is deceptively simple yet layered. Saira, Ashar, Usman and Areen once lived in Karachi, the city of their teenage triumphs, rebellions and emotional catastrophes. Now, three of them have fashioned new homes for themselves in Australia and the US, and inhabit different spheres largely detached from their roots. Nevertheless, their destinies remain inextricably linked to Karachi because of a secret that scars all of them, especially Areen.

Years later, when Karachi-based Saira receives an unsettling message from Areen — now an artist in New York — she reaches out to Ashar and Usman to enlist them in yet another attempt to ensure their friend’s well-being. Fuelled by habit, or a desire to protect their struggling companion, Saira, Usman and Ashar slip back into their predefined and well-rehearsed roles. It does not take them long to realise that the thrills and terrors of the past run the risk of obstructing the dynamics of the present, leading all four of them to revive their forgotten, transgressive selves.

The twists and turns of Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light cannot be delineated without revealing spoilers. The strength of Elahi’s narrative lies in its ability to deviate from the predictable path and employ numerous methods to draw readers into this suspenseful work. The narrative is sculpted as a mosaic, and readers are encouraged to piece together a sea of fragments into a cohesive whole. Instead of following a linear trajectory, the story alternates between past and present, specifically 2008 and 2022.

The reader’s curiosity is initially sparked by a succinct prologue, in which ravenous flames lick every corner of a room and reduce it to ashes. As the “flames glow bright orange like the sun in its prime”, fear instantly finds residence in the room. Through this opening sequence, readers gain an inkling of the personal and emotional degradation that haunts the pages of Elahi’s novel.

The sinister undertone of Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light is reinforced by an omniscient yet reserved narrator. Resembling a strategic poker player, the all-knowing, wily narrator conceals their hand and allows key information to fall gradually into the reader’s lap. These techniques transform the novel into an intricate puzzle for readers to solve.

The plot is deceptively simple yet layered. Saira, Ashar, Usman and Areen once lived in Karachi, the city of their teenage triumphs, rebellions and emotional catastrophes. Now, three of them have fashioned new homes for themselves in Australia and the US, and inhabit different spheres largely detached from their roots. Nevertheless, their destinies remain inextricably linked to Karachi because of a secret that scars all of them, especially Areen.

The centrepiece of Elahi’s third novel is the final section, which skilfully employs the second-person perspective to reveal the fragility of Areen’s fractured mind. This proves to be an effective technique, as it achieves a level of intimacy and discomfort that a first-person account might not have conveyed.

Driven by quiet but chaotic restraint, the final section begins to resemble the pages of an emotionally disturbed artist’s diary. The peculiar darkness of Areen’s mind is mirrored in the urgent, affecting prose, which reminds readers of the importance of therapy in addressing the burdens of unresolved traumas.

Elahi’s novels have sought to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health. Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light consolidates this commitment by urging us to prioritise our own psychological well-being while also recognising the plight of those who must carry the debilitating weight of emotional trauma.

Elahi ought to be commended for the profoundly original title of her new novel that, incidentally, echoes her characters’ emotional trajectory. Throughout the novel, the four friends are haunted by the shadows of the past, which they pursue and seek to escape in equal measure.

Ashar struggles to cope with a painful history of grief. Saira is driven by the muscle memory of empathy she once exercised as a silent witness to Areen’s traumatic experiences during their teenage years. Usman, who has escaped and created some semblance of a stable future for himself, is still guided by the pleasant memories of someone he once abandoned. Areen carries the trauma of an abusive childhood, compounded by the guilt of the actions she took to shield herself from harm. The group gradually learns to deal with the futility of their individual pursuits, except for Areen, who plunges deeper into an emotional vortex.

Beyond its focus on the psychological journey of its cast of characters, Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light captures the complexities of Pakistani expatriate life without relying on stereotypical assumptions. Furthermore, the novel carries faint echoes of Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, albeit without its political dimensions.

Stripped of this layer, Elahi’s new work emerges as a more personal glimpse into the lives of ordinary Karachiites grappling with childhood trauma, and their complex relationship with home amid the pressures of globalisation.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 10th, 2026

The term ‘katabasis’ literally means a journey to the underworld, whereby a living individual heroically goes all the way to the kingdom of the dead for a specific purpose. In classical mythology, some of the most famous examples of such heroes are Orpheus and Aeneas.

The novel, which is a work of fantasy set in the realm of an alternative reality, begins by noting that the protagonist Alice Law’s Cambridge adviser Jacob Grimes has been blown up due to a magical experiment that went horribly wrong. So devastating was the death that his eviscerated body and mutilated remains could only be collected in a bucket by the university’s janitorial scouts! Since Grimes was, unquestionably, one of the top names in Cambridge’s Department of Analytic Magick, Alice is dismayed at the prospect of having to shift to an inferior academic adviser, who will not be able to provide the references and connections that Grimes could have.

Unquestionably brilliant herself and undeniably driven, Alice sketches a complex pentagram and prepares to sojourn to the underworld, armed with a Perpetual Flask (of enchanted drinking water that never runs out) and Lembas Bread (highly enriched protein bars ideal for such macabre camping trips). Much to her dismay, another highly talented advisee of Grimes’, Peter Murdoch (originally educated at Oxford), shows up and insists on accompanying her to hell.

After an academic adviser is blown up in a magical experiment, two of his students make a perilous journey to the underworld to rescue him in this fantasy novel.

Kuang’s version of the underworld is a combination of that alluded to in Dante’s Inferno and Chinese mythology (one of its major deities is the grim god Yama or Yanluo Wang). She keeps her landscape logical and relatively simple. Alice and Peter are expected to proceed through seven levels of the underworld, namely Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty and Tyranny, before ending up at the Eighth Court and pleading with Yama to return Dr Grimes to the land of the living. They have to be careful to avoid the waters of Lethe (which in Greek mythology was the river of forgetfulness) since the river has the ability to obliterate memories, purpose and consciousness.

Although they respect each other as academics, Alice and Peter squabble a great deal along the way about sundry topics, ranging from conundrums of logic to complex mathematical paradoxes. Their innate humanity and engaging interactions undeniably count as the best part of the book. Both ranked among Grimes’ best students, but he was a nasty and phenomenally egotistical man who subjected them to a great deal of emotional abuse and mental cruelty. Their intrepid journey ultimately ends up being less about retrieving Grimes and more about wrestling with their internal demons, which are symbolic of his unhealthy hold over them both.

Kuang does a wonderful job of depicting the power struggles that constitute the dark heart of academic life. Some of the major characters whom Peter and Alice encounter are the souls (referred to in the book as ‘Shades’ per classical tradition) of intellectually gifted individuals who killed themselves because they were unable to cope with the obscene pressures, jealousies and rivalries of the world’s highest ranking and most illustrious academic institutions.

For instance, a former advisee of Grimes named Elspeth, could have had a very fine career had she not been irreparably damaged on the psychological level by the cruelty of her adviser. Fundamentally a decent woman, albeit batty and eccentric, Elspeth proves instrumental in helping Alice reach Yama.

“She was deep in Cruelty. At some point in the night she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree. Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty f****d with you on purpose. She kept coming across mysterious structures — interlacing bone, precipitously balanced, arranged occasionally like abstract art. Shapes carved out on the sand. Footsteps, maybe human, dancing in patterns she couldn’t make sense of.” — Excerpt from the book

One of the most memorable characters in the novel is Archimedes, a Cambridge cat who can bridge the gulf between the world of the living and that of the dead. His sense of morality is more honourable than that of most of the human figures in the novel, including its protagonists. Neither Alice nor Peter, however, are as sadistic and demented as the Kripke trio, a pair of dark magicians and their son who prey on the more helpless beings in the underworld.

As it progresses, the book begins to display darker undertones. Much to their horror, Peter and Alice discover that it was due to their own errors that Grimes’ magical pentagram had ended up killing him. Any reader will ask himself or herself why Grimes didn’t notice a rookie mistake in the spell he was casting.

In order to appreciate this point, one needs to keep in mind that major academics tend to be notoriously careless about looking over academic minutiae. On a personal level, I was rather amused once, when I was working at the American University in Cairo, to find that an Egyptian secretary had changed the spelling of ‘Jane Austen’ in one of my missives to ‘Jane Austin’ and felt she had done me a great favour! Had I not been in the habit of meticulously checking drafts of my writing, I would not have noticed this and, while the error wouldn’t have got me killed, it would have made me a laughing-stock in certain circles.

Perhaps Kuang would have benefitted from keeping the novel shorter. There is an uneven nature to the work that might have been more excusable were she a less experienced novelist. For instance, the almost obsessive focus on conundrums of logic and magical pentagrams begins to grate on the nerves halfway through the book and, while the earlier levels of Hell such as Pride and Desire are painstakingly described, Tyranny barely makes a blip on the plot’s radar.

Alice, who appears to be an alter ego of Kuang herself (both are Westernised but have Chinese origins), is earnest and dedicated but also rather self-indulgent. After a while, Kuang seems less interested in refining a good adventure story and more invested in getting us to sympathise with how much Alice has been through.

Given that the author holds academic degrees from Georgetown, Oxford and Cambridge and is currently at Yale, perhaps one can understand that her creative vision is somewhat shackled by her personal academic experiences. However, the best and most visionary novels of the fantasy genre are never self-indulgent. Had that been the case with Frank Herbert’s Dune, it would never have won the Hugo and the Nebula awards.

I disagree with Olivie Blake’s marketing blurb that states Katabasis is destined to be a modern classic. Something that reads like a young-adult novel masquerading as a book for older adults, and which is part JK Rowling and part Dorothy Sayers in terms of literary flavour, requires more than good marketing in order to withstand the test of time. Depicting the heroine feeding desperately on a hapless cat’s viscera does not connote genius, and it takes a clear-headed mind to point out that, in this novel’s case, the emperor, while not precisely naked, is hardly looking resplendent.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that the book is entertaining, well-written, worth a read if one has time to spare, and helps to underscore that one doesn’t need to be white in order to be taken seriously by those who are. Katabasis’ implicit agenda, therefore, is political not literary. But given the freedom that creativity confers on all authors, great or small, Kuang need hardly be faulted for this.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 3rd, 2026

The library’s management posted an appeal for funds on Tuesday, announcing that they would be shutting down as a hike in rent had made running the venue unaffordable and that they needed Rs500,000 for relocation.

On Friday, three days after the appeal went live, they announced they had met their funding goal in under an hour after people, believing in the citizen-run initiative’s vision, rallied to its cause.

“Karachi… you did it,” the announcement read, “We posted the first call for funds in the midst of planning our sabbatical, but you guys stopped us in our tracks. We met the fundraising goal in 53 MINUTES, and in three days, you TRIPLED it.”

The management said donations came through across multiple local channels as well as foreign contributions on Venmo and Zelle. Individual contributions ranged from Rs500 to $1,350 (over Rs370,000).

Their current premises appear to also have been saved by the intervention of an unnamed supporter and negotiations are underway to keep Kitab Ghar operating at its present location for another 11 months.

The library’s administration said they intend to relocate to a more affordable and sustainable venue, but this will allow for a smoother transition with minimal disruptions.

Kitab Ghar will be hosting celebratory events which will “help keep the lights on”, and organisers have asked the community to stay tuned for further announcements on their social media accounts.

For now though, this story has a happy ending and the library’s team is grateful to the community behind it. “Thank you for saving Kitab Ghar,” their announcement read. “It’s an honour to serve every one of you.”

In an Instagram post, the management of the venue in PECHS said recent gentrification of the area around the citizen-run public library had led to an increase in rent, which they could no longer afford to pay.

They said they knew what the place meant to their patrons and the community that had formed around it, and that they “do not deliver this news lightly”. They said they had provided the city with a place to “love”, “laugh”, “make art”, “congregate” and “be political” for 18 months and would have loved to continue doing so were they not “being forced to shut down”.

“If you need a Kitab Ghar near you, trust us when we tell you that we need you more,” the management said and that, while they planned to relocate to a new spot and continue serving the city, they couldn’t afford to do so yet.

To that end, they said they had set up a fundraiser with a goal of collecting Rs500,000 to be put towards finding and setting up the next Kitab Ghar Karachi. “We exist because you do,” the library’s team said. “Wherever you are, if you believe in the Kitab Ghar mission, please donate.”

Kitab Ghar is free for people to visit and use as a study and social space, with some events being ticketed. The bulk of their funding comes from monthly donation pledges and one-time contributions by patrons.

The management thanked their “comrades, patrons, and regulars” for “walking with us in our justaju [struggle] for something better”.

Her latest novelistic endeavour, Boleyn Traitor, focuses on the life of Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford, who was married to Anne’s brother George. Jane was suspected of having betrayed both siblings, who ended up losing their heads due to the wrath of Henry VIII. One of the most educated women in Tudor England, thanks to the encouragement of her learned father, Lord Morley, Jane used her skills and wits in order to survive in an increasingly unstable royal court.

Gregory situates the action of her novel during the eight-year period from 1534 to 1542, which saw the beheading of Anne Boleyn, the death of Jane Seymour, the annulment of Anne of Cleves’ marriage to King Henry, and the execution — for committing adultery — of the young Queen Katherine, who was originally a scion of the powerful Howard family.

Jane had also served as one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies, so her remarkable stint at court involved service, in total, to no fewer than five royal queens. Gregory presents a sympathetic portrayal of Viscountess Rochford, implying that it would have done her no good to attempt to defend her husband and Anne from the charges of incest. One message that clearly emerges from Gregory’s writing is that Henry VIII pulled no punches when it came to casting aside anything that got in the way of his capricious desires. He went from being a spoiled prince to becoming a tyrannical king.

Jane’s own downfall lay in the fact that she was not only sympathetic to Katherine Howard’s passion for the young and handsome courtier Thomas Culpeper, but she actually aided and abetted their courtship. However, given that Henry was a very ill and deranged individual by that point, Viscountess Rochford was by no means the only person at court to sympathise with Katheryn Howard’s predicament and desperation.

Nevertheless, in spite of her considerable political expertise, Jane Boleyn ended up pushing her luck too far in this case. So incensed was Henry at her role in the affair that he passed a special act through parliament that allowed him to execute Jane, even though his personal physician (Doctor Butts) had declared her insane and unfit to be condemned to death.

While there is most likely a whole lot more, historically speaking, to explain why Henry bounced from one wife to another with impunity, readers in general — and feminist readers in particular — will find this book to be a refreshing addition to the genre of historical fiction. In a day and age when a childless and widowed noblewoman (whose husband had been disgraced and executed) could barely make ends meet, Jane survived this traumatic period by becoming an effective spy at court for the brilliant lawyer Thomas Cromwell.

Although Cromwell had been instrumental in engineering the downfall of Anne Boleyn, he acted in Henry’s best interests by allying England with the Protestant powers of Germany, by encouraging the king to marry Anne of Cleves (following the death of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour).

Whimsical, egotistical and capricious, however, Henry didn’t care for the sensible German princess. She may have ended up suffering the same fate as Anne Boleyn had Viscountess Rochford not urged Anne of Cleves (at the instigation, and with the cooperation, of Cromwell) to accept an annulment of her marriage, along with the gift of a couple of rich palaces and an extensive staff of 8,000 noblemen and ladies.

Jane Boleyn was, in many ways, the ideal courtier. Superbly discreet, sympathetic, sensible and never easily ruffled, she did her best to serve her female bosses as honourably as possible without ruffling the feathers of the increasingly unstable Henry. Her closest relationship was with Thomas Cromwell, in that (although it was never sexualised) their friendship was a liaison of well-matched minds.

Jane held a low opinion of her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk; this was somewhat justified since he was a selfish and self-serving man, unlike Cromwell, who generally had the nation’s best interests at heart. Most of the other male figures in the novel do not shine in contrast to Jane, probably because Philippa Gregory wanted to create a shrewd and experienced central character in this book, who — had it not been for her gender — might theoretically have risen to a much higher post than that of a lady-in-waiting.

But part of Jane Boleyn’s survival skills was her ability to make the most of what she had, and to play the cards that she was dealt by fate to the best of her ability. Although able to mask her true feelings at court on a regular basis, her grief at Katherine of Aragon’s death, as well as at Thomas Cromwell’s, was sincere.

She prevented Anne of Cleves from losing her head and managed to run each queen’s household with ostensible propriety, efficiency, and a strong sense of diligence. She did not allow herself to be embroiled in a second marriage, which would have left her at the mercy of some nobleman’s moods and whims.

Instead, thanks to Cromwell’s assistance, she managed to obtain for herself the residence of Blickling Hall, along with a regular monetary allowance at court. Had Katherine Howard been a less foolish woman, Jane herself might have outlived Henry VIII (who died shortly after he married his sixth wife, Kathryn/Katherine Parr).

But as the grim, senseless and sordid execution of an old woman like Margaret Pole proved, Henry was not above executing anyone whom he perceived to be a threat, even if they had previously served the royal family well. Margaret had been the king’s late mother’s best friend, but that did not prevent Henry from tossing the old lady into the Tower of London, and then getting rid of her permanently when it suited his purpose.

Perhaps Jane’s ultimate victory lay in the manner in which she lived her life. Given the dangers prevalent and rampant in the treacherous Tudor court, her rapid imprisonment and death were simply a matter of time. But even if one’s luck may eventually run out, the legacy of one’s name may live on through the ages.

Five centuries after her demise, Jane Boleyn is regarded not as a traitor but as someone who, in our world, would have merited the compliment of being called a consummate professional.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 5th, 2026

The shortlisted books span across time and space, from a Mandarin novel set in 1930s Taiwan to suburban France in the 1990s. Two of the books are debut novels, while two the author/translator pairs have previously been nominated for the prize.

Across the books, there is a consistent theme of control. In some way or another, all six titles follow characters as they struggle with forces more powerful than themselves and face some sort of curtailment of their freedom.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

The polyphonic German novel written by Shida Bazyar and translated by Ruth Martin follows two generations of an Iranian family as they live their lives, at home and in exile, through some of the most turbulent moments in the country’s history.

In a statement to the award’s organisers, Bazyar explained, “The main thing I wanted was to understand my parents’ story. The book isn’t autobiographical, but I spent many hours interviewing my parents for research, to find out what their political life was like in Iran, what their resistance looked like, and how they ended up fleeing to Germany, where I was born.”

She Who Remains

She Who Remains, the debut novel from Bulgarian novelist Rene Karabash and translated by Izidora Angel, is set in a remote Albanian village, closed off to the outside world and governed by ancient customs. When forced to marry against her will, she becomes a sworn virgin and a series of chaotic mishappenings drive her away from everyone she loves.

Karabash said she had known she wanted to write this story for a long time but couldn’t pin down its characters until she was at a photo exhibition on Albania’s sworn virgins. She said she spent two years researching the group and then wrote the book in two months.

The Director

Set in Nazi Germany, Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, is the pair’s second nomination for an International Booker Prize. The book follows a fictionalised account of the life of acclaimed German film director GW Pabst. A dissident in exile, he returns to Austria — formally part of Germany after the Anschluss in 1938 — when his mother falls ill and slowly gets pulled into the German propaganda machine.

Kehlmann said using Pabst as the main character allowed him “an entrance into a dictatorship from the angle of someone returning from ‘a free country’ and learning the rules as he goes”.

On Earth As It Is Beneath

Set in the depths of a Brazilian penal colony, On Earth As It Is Beneath is written by Ana Paula Maia and translated by Padma Vishvanathan. The 100-page read packs a deep, dark punch, with themes of slavery, torture and a perversion of justice.

Talking about her journey researching and writing the book, Maia said, “The more I reflected on the prison system in Brazil and other parts of the world, the more I realised that beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible.”

The Witch

Marie NDiaye’s The Witch — translated from French by Jordan Stump — follows…a witch. Well, a woman with supernatural powers who nonetheless lives an ordinary life, in an unremarkable French town, dealing with her unhappy marriage. She does pass her magical gifts on to her daughters though and they surpass her strength and sorcery ability. Much like Kehlmann and Benjamin, this is NDiaye and Stump’s second nomination.

The author said she wanted to redefine the term ‘witch’ with her book, bring it back into the public discourse. That’s why she said she created a “contemporary witch: not very confident in her gift, even a little ashamed of it, and not particularly successful in passing it down to her daughters, who, modern teenagers that they are, don’t believe in it.”

Taiwan Travelogue

The last book on the shortlist, Yáng Shuāng-zi and Lin King’s Taiwan Travelogue follows a culinary writer on a trip through Japanese-occupied Taiwan. The book is written as the translation of a fictional memoir and has won Taiwan’s highest literary honour.

Shuāng-zi said the book was an exploration of the island’s complex history with colonialism, where Japanese occupation is not viewed as harshly as it is in South Korea. She also joked, “Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up.”

Cover photo: India Hobson for Booker Prize Foundation

In Rebel English Academy, Mohammed Hanif opens up the charged space between fact and rumour, showing how, in Pakistan, political gossip is never just talk. Set in the days following Bhutto’s execution, the novel unfolds in the fictional OK Town, where grief, denial and opportunism mingle in the air, and whispers travel quickly — from tea stalls to offices, from mosque loudspeakers to private bedrooms.

Soldiers, clerics and ordinary citizens alike find themselves unsettled by the slogan “Bhutto Lives”. Hanif understands something we continue to witness today: power may control events, but it rarely controls the story that follows.

It is through people, not slogans, that this tension becomes visible. Hanif explores three lives that reflect different responses to power. The first is Sir Baghi, who embodies the exhaustion of failed rebellion. Once a fiery revolutionary who paid for his rhetoric with torture, he now runs a modest English academy in a mosque’s compound. The academy of the novel’s title is less a school than a scaled-down revolution, a space where rebellion survives in language when it can no longer survive in politics; here, Baghi’s revolution narrows into grammar lessons and small, stubborn principles, a form of survival that may still afford him some dignity.

In contrast, Captain Gul represents a different kind of survival. Young, ambitious and slightly ridiculous, he works for the Field Intelligence Unit and dreams of becoming a legend whispered about in foreign capitals. Instead, he is posted to OK Town, where he must deal with slogans claiming “Bhutto Lives.” He is ordered to “make him go away” again, as if rumour requires a second burial. His bravado masks insecurity. He is loyal to the state but unsettled by how easily a whisper can undermine it.

Between these two men stands Sabiha Bano, who refuses both nostalgia and obedience. Once Baghi’s student and the daughter of a labour union leader, she re-enters his life carrying a pistol and difficult questions. Her essay Our Cow begins as a school exercise and turns into a charged memory of comrades, fire and impending violence. When she confronts Baghi and asks whether he is still the rebel people claim he was, she exposes the gap between his past and present. Sabiha is not content with nostalgia. She is impatient with compromise.

It is in the friction between these three lives that the novel’s argument takes shape. Hanif does not linger on them merely for colour or subplot; each becomes a way of thinking about power. Through Baghi, we see what happens to rebellion when it survives but does not win. Through Gul, we see how authority performs strength while remaining anxious about legitimacy. Through Sabiha, we see the cost of inheriting both failure and force. Their stories are not digressions from the political moment, but its most intimate expression.

However, as the narrative expands in different directions, its momentum is occasionally unsettled by frequent shifts in perspectives and the sheer sprawl of voices and episodes. The narrative moves from Captain Gul’s cantonment theatrics to Baghi’s bruised introspection, from Sabiha’s essays to the spectacle of the alleged rumour-spreader’s burning.

In a town gripped by rumours and fear after the hanging of an ex-prime minister, stories do not unfold neatly. They collide, overlap and burn out mid-sentence. The fragmentation reflects a society where no life is allowed a single, uninterrupted narrative.

Hanif writes in a brisk, controlled style that carries the sharpness of his journalism. His sentences move quickly, often driven by dialogue that feels lived-in and unfiltered. He has a keen ear for how people in power speak, how rumours sound in a bazaar and how piety and paranoia share the same vocabulary. At times, this journalistic edge turns the novel into something close to public commentary. The satire bites harder than the sentiment lingers, giving the book its urgency and political clarity.

To write about a leader who was executed decades ago is not, in Hanif’s hands, an act of nostalgia. It is a way of asking why that moment still feels unfinished. The novel does not appear stuck in the past so much as alert to how often Pakistan returns to it and how the same tensions between elected power and uniformed authority resurface under new names and new slogans. Bhutto becomes less a historical figure and more a recurring argument.

The strong presence of Captain Gul underscores how deeply institutional power continues to shape civilian life. If there is an allegory here, it is not about one man’s authoritarian streak but about a cycle in which charisma, populism and control blur into one another.

Hanif suggests that, unless the balance between civilian rule and state authority is resolved, history will not simply echo but repeat itself. In that sense, Rebel English Academy reads less like a backwards glance and more like a warning about cycles we have yet to break.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 15th, 2026

Deighton’s thick-bespectacled agent provided an antidote to the debonair naval officer James Bond created by Ian Fleming. The character’s rough edges also set him apart from gentleman spy George Smiley featured in books by John Le Carre.

Deighton’s spy was anonymous in his first book, The Ipcress File (1962), and its sequels Horse Under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion-Dollar Brain (1966). But the anti-hero was baptised Harry Palmer for the hugely successful film version of the Ipcress File starring Caine, which brought Deighton to a wider audience.

Deighton, who like his spy also wore thick spectacles, lived life out of the limelight, rarely giving interviews.

Yet he sold millions of books in the English-speaking world and was translated into 20 languages over a career spanning half a century.

Originally published in Dawn, March 18th, 2026

Cover photo: AFP

In the speech, which was published by Zeteo on Thursday, Roy said while the gathering was focused on her book, she couldn’t “end the day without talking about those beautiful cities — Tehran, Isfahan, and Beirut — that are up in flames.” She said she’d like to use some of “my Mother Mary’s spirit of candour and impoliteness” to talk about “the unprovoked and illegal attack by the United States and Israel on Iran”.

The author referred to the bombing campaign in Iran as a “a continuation of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza,” but contended that “Iran is not Gaza”.

She said the world stands on the precipice of “nuclear calamity and economic collapse” as “the same country that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be readying itself to bomb one of the most ancient civilisations in the world”. Any regime change, she said, needs to come from the people and “not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission”.

Roy said Iran was standing up to the imperialists “while India cowers”, adding that she was ashamed of how “gutless” and “spineless” the Indian government was in dealing with Israel and the US. She lamented that her country had lost its pride and dignity, “except in our movies”. “Let me simply say that I stand with Iran. Unequivocally,” the author said

She decried Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Israel and his government’s trade relations with the US, questioning what it means for India to get the country’s “permission” to buy oil from Russia.

She also called out the Indian government for sending Indian workers to Israel to replace expelled Palestinians, adding that these workers were reportedly not allowed to use air raid shelters during Iran’s retaliatory fire on Israeli cities.

“Who has put us into this absolutely humiliating, shameless, disgusting place in the world?” Roy asked.

The author said the term “running dogs of imperialists” — used by Chinese politician Mao Zedong to describe allies of Imperialist powers — “describes [India] well. Except, of course, in our twisted, toxic movies in which our celluloid heroes strut on, winning phantom war after war, dumb and over-muscled. Fuelling our insatiable bloodlust with their gratuitous violence.”

Roy is no stranger to taking strong and vocal stances on issues she cares about, she recently made headlines for pulling out of the Berlin International Film Festival over the president of the festival’s jury saying cinema should “stay out of politics” when asked about Gaza. Earlier, she signed a pledge not to work with Israeli cultural institutions over complicity in the state’s war on Gaza.

Her writing is also considered seditious by the Indian government, which banned her 2020 book Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction in India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir for “propagating false narrative and secessionism”.

Cover photo: Arundhati Roy/Facebook

Zaher’s unnamed narrator is Palestinian, lives in New York, and has impeccable taste and meticulous hygiene. She is wealthy but has limited access to her wealth. Her homeland exists exceedingly in her imagination, as she struggles to thrive in America.

She is also a teacher working at a school for underprivileged boys. It is here that she feels the most in control. Her unconventional teaching methods resonate with the seventh graders, who feel their voices matter most within the four walls of their classroom.

Throughout the book, there is a symbiotic relationship between the narrator and her students — “They were on the margins, and I understand the drive to reclaim American democracy for all, but I think it’s an afterthought.” She is acutely aware of their circumstances and looks beyond their shortcomings, focusing on their intellect and strengths that might not be visible at first glance, but which are still there.

In turn, the students provide her a semblance of control and stability that she struggles for outside the classroom. They value her presence in their lives and provide meaning to her daily routine. For me, this was one of the most endearing parts of this book.

The Coin reads at a frenetic pace. Like a kaleidoscope, it flits between the various aspects of the narrator’s identity, going back and forth as she grapples with transactional relationships outside of her work. She finds herself searching for something throughout the book. As a reader, you can’t place your finger on it. Neither can she. This is the strength of Zaher’s writing; she keeps her reader at par with the narrator, so we go through the motions with her.

She is a Palestinian living in New York, trying to reconcile the fractures that exist within her identity. Zaher writes, “I used to think that if people saw the real face of wickedness, not the mask, they would revolt… When Netanyahu and Trump were elected, I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster, the rich want to look poor.”

It is here you realise that, perhaps, what the narrator is looking for in her relationships and daily interactions is a sense of homeland. In a deeply profound way, Zaher highlights how important it is to have a strong sense of identity and belonging. The narrator finds making connections a tedious business, even though she tries her best; eventually, every relationship she has reaches a point where her need to belong remains unfulfilled.

The Coin is a study in resistance. One of the most defining features of Zaher’s protagonist is her militant obsession with hygiene, which stems from a childhood trauma when she accidentally swallowed a shekel that she believes is still lodged somewhere in her body. This fixation on an internal impurity is what drives her to scrub, sanitise and control her external world with a ferocity that contributes to alienating her from those around her.

This struggle for bodily autonomy also puts her at odds with the society that she is a part of. Despite her wealth and expensive taste, she remains an outsider as a stateless Palestinian in America. Her involvement in a Birkin bag pyramid scheme further isolates her. Her rebellion is complex and sheds light on rampant American consumerism and casual racism.

Zaher’s writing is witty, chaotic and stylish, as it compels the reader to be pulled into the narrator’s increasingly unhinged stream of consciousness. The reasons for her bizarre behaviour slowly become easier to understand as you become privy to her every thought and justification.

In the landscape of contemporary writing, Zaher’s novel will remind the reader of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, in which the protagonist asserts herself through a singular obsessive act that becomes an external manifestation of rebellion against societal norms that seek to imprison her. Both Yasmin Zaher and Han Kang explore the harrowing consequences of seeking absolute control over one’s own body in societies that demand conformity, arriving at a similar chilling conclusion: that the struggle for autonomy in a repressive world can lead to alienation from the self and society.

Zaher has a profound control over language. She writes with devastating certainty: “Maybe pretence was all there was. Fashion is pretence, education is pretence, personality, too, is a form of internalised pretence. I wondered what my true essence would be if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.”

The Coin is a novel that Yasmin Zaher identifies with complexities that lie at the heart of identity politics and the struggle to reclaim oneself. Zaher’s use of tightly controlled yet vivid imagery allows an exploration into themes of privilege, suffering and statelessness. There is no excessive moralising or conclusion, while the novel traces the unravelling of Zaher’s protagonist.

Yasmin Zaher’s writing is intimate and focuses on the sensory nature and physicality of language to convey her narrator’s escalating obsession. The Coin will stay with the reader, for better or for worse, much like life. It is an amalgamation of chaos and calm, where a lot happens over the course of time, but, at the same time, nothing happens at all.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 1st, 2026

Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from Rebel English Academy, published recently by Maktaba-i-Danyal in Pakistan.

On the night of the hanging

Every thing is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims or their loved ones, which in most cases are the same people.

The Rawalpindi sky is clear and full of stars; all the talk about omens is rubbish: there are no meteor showers, no storms brewing on the horizon, the sky is not going to shed tears of blood, the earth is not about to split open and swallow its wretched inhabitants and their grief.

The man who is awake has asked for a safety razor, claiming that he doesn’t want to look like a mullah in death. After consultations with superiors, the jail superintendent has sent for a barber, who shaves the man gently, making sure to clear the fuzz from his earlobes. The man asks for a cigar and the jail superintendent doesn’t need to ask for his superiors’ permission. No man who is about to be hanged in three hours and forty-five minutes has ever tried to kill himself with a Montecristo.

The jailer makes sure to light it himself; the man chews on his cigar, takes two deep puffs and regrets it, thinking maybe he should have quit when he had the time. The man asks for his Shalimar perfume, sprays himself and lies down on the floor. A mosquito buzzes near his ear. On any other night he might have called in the jailer and given him a dressing-down for infesting his prison cell with poisonous insects, might have accused him of being a tool of the White Elephant, his favourite invective for the United States of America, but tonight he just shoos the mosquito away half-heartedly, listening to the rising and fading whirr of its wings. He is grateful for the company.

Everyone agrees on the above events. Those who wanted to hang him, those who wanted to save him, those who wanted a martyr in the early morning whose blood could help them bring about a revolution, even those who were indifferent, all agree up to this point that the man lay down on the floor, pulled a sheet over himself and stayed still, dress-rehearsing being dead.

Although everything was still and orderly in and around the cell where an about-to-be hanged man practised his death pose, there was activity, quite a lot of activity, around the country in some crucial spots. Many would later say, especially journalists and diplomats who made a living out of exaggeration, that it was the longest night of their lives, that they knew something historic, something catastrophic was about to happen. But only those who had been woken up without warning with a degree of rudeness would remember this night when their own time came.

An imam was hauled up from his small room adjacent to his small mosque and ordered to get ready to lead the funeral prayers of a very important man. One of the world’s sturdiest planes, a C-130, was on standby at Rawalpindi air base to ferry the body to the man’s village. A military truck followed by six machine-gun-mounted jeeps made its way towards the airport, with some sleepy, some alert soldiers, their commander wondering why a dead man needed so much protection. Elites stay elite even in their death, he thought.

Some soldiers sang a tea jingle: “Chai chahyie, kaunsi janab.”

“Shut up,” barked the commander. “We are on VIP duty.”

A caretaker at the village graveyard was asked to start digging a grave, and when he asked what size, he was slapped. “Your own size,” he was told.

Above are the facts that everyone agrees upon. As with every hanging, there are differing accounts about the man’s walk to the gallows. How did he walk? Some say he never actually walked. That he collapsed on the shoulders of his jail guards and had to be carried. His jiyalas say that he walked on steady feet, head held high, climbed onto the podium as if addressing the nation one last time, kissed the noose and put it around his neck.

Others say he was carried on a stretcher and two policemen, themselves shaking at the gravity of the moment, had to prop him up by his armpits before fitting the rope around his neck. You can’t hang a man when he is horizontal on a stretcher.

There was one oversight by the jail superintendent, but that was taken care of by the ingenuity of a captain who happened to be on the scene on a top-secret mission. After discovering that the jail administration had forgotten to order a coffin, the captain barged into the jail armoury, looked around, saw a body-sized wooden crate that was used to store the jail guards’ rusting guns, shouted at them for not having any respect for their weapons and handed the crate over to the jailer who, in gratitude, leapt forward to kiss his hands.

The captain put his hands behind his back and reminded him that he was on post-hanging photo-shoot duty and would like a few private moments with the body after the man was hanged. The jailer agreed, knowing he had no choice in the matter, and asked the captain if he would like to witness the hanging. The captain declined the offer, saying he wasn’t on hanging duty.

He was here on a different mission.

Before being taken to the waiting cargo plane, the hanged man was left alone in the jail superintendent’s office for a few minutes with the captain, who had brought a professional photographer with him. In those few minutes, the photographer had to perform the most shameless, and as these things go hand in hand, the most high-powered assignment of his otherwise mediocre career.

He pulled down the hanged man’s soiled shalwar and, with the flash on, took half a dozen photos of his genitalia. It was done in the forlorn hope of confirming the persistent rumour that the hanged man was not circumcised and hence a Hindu. The very fact that photos were never processed or released was proof enough that the man was indeed circumcised and hence a Muslim.

The man himself might have argued forcefully that the one didn’t prove the other, that many Muslims in his hometown never bothered to circumcise their children. But this little episode ended when the captain made a phone call and reported that the bastard was dead and circumcised. There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. The director of Field Intelligence Unit’s internal security said that the bastard was lying and cheating even in his death. “And you, Captain, you had one job. What are we going to do with you?” said the director and put the phone back on its cradle with historic disappointment.

The nation was thus spared the indignity of waking up to newspapers with pictures of a hanged man’s genitalia on the front pages.

The captain was punished with a transfer to a town where car number plates started with the letters OK and where people from far-off districts came to get their vehicles registered. The captain had done a brief stint in OK town cantonment after getting his commission three and a half years ago and knew that the vehicle registration plates were the only exciting thing about the city. He knew he would need to create his own entertainment and come up with a mission to shine on this punishment posting.

Three nights after the hanging, when our captain, let’s call him Captain Gul, is inspecting his room in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and testing the strength of his bed, all the while looking at himself in the dressing table’s smudged mirror, admiring a hint of a cleft in his chin, his wild sideburns and lush black moustache, a few miles away there is a knock on the door of the Rebel English Academy which, despite its misleading name, is a law-abiding and affordable tuition centre for basic English. Its founder and sole teacher, Sir Baghi, is about to receive a young lady guest he is not expecting at all.

Allah’s will

Molly Rafique must have planned it this way, although he would insist forever that it was all Allah’s will. When Molly sneaks his young lady friend into the academy, Sir Baghi is finally enjoying an afternoon of solitude.

He had sent his students home the moment they heard a newspaper hawker shouting in the street about the hanging. Baghi knows that it will be a very long weekend. He wants to use this unexpected holiday to mark papers, review his syllabus and read the fourth chapter of To the Lighthouse.

He also plans a visit to Venus cinema for a matinee in the hope of finding some random afternoon love. It’s not in his nature to be optimistic but he is hoping that the cinema won’t be shut down.

Molly’s lady friend carries a faded sea-green sports bag, with the logo of a panther in the middle of a leap, ‘Pride of OK Town’ inscribed under the panther in fading gold letters. She is wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms, a white dupatta embroidered with white and yellow nargis flowers loosely draped around her neck, a girl old enough to know that she needs a dupatta but young enough not to know what to do with it. She has the air of somebody about to take a leap and start running, somebody who is being chased by their own past or, at least, what they hope is their past.

Molly is sweating, his forehead a network of the entire world’s troubles. A sheen of sweat covers his shaved upper lip, his famous beard quivering. “Can you look after my guest while I do the funeral prayers?”

Funeral prayers? Baghi groans, the veins in his neck bulge because of the unspoken words. He always buttons up his always-black shirt’s collar, less a sartorial choice and more an attempt to hide a crimson hammer and sickle tattoo on his upper chest. Baghi is past his shouting days but he still gets the occasional urge.

He knows the mosque is Molly’s business but why does Molly want to have a funeral in absentia for a man hanged two hundred miles away and buried in his village in the dead of the night three days ago? A man who was clearly a feudal despot in the clothes of an awami pseudo-socialist, bald and squeaky and certain of his own immortality, the type of man who, from his death cell, writes a threatening pamphlet titled ‘If I Am Assassinated’ … and is assassinated anyway, someone who says you can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea. Baghi wants to tell Molly you can’t have a funeral in absentia for an idea. But the mosque is Molly’s business.

On another day he might have said, Molly, surely you don’t want to start a socialist revolution in your mosque? Better not to start it anywhere — look at me.

“What can I do? The bazaar is full of jiyalas and they want a funeral. I know he wasn’t very nice to you but he is gone to Allah now, where we all must go one day, and we must honour the dead,” says Molly, moving towards the door.

Yes, we must honour the dead, Baghi wants to say, even if the dead once had a chilli-powder-laced rod rammed up my ass for writing a letter.

Baghi also wants to say that this is a teaching institution and not a resting place for girls with hurriedly packed sports bags but, before he can say it, Molly is gone, leaving behind the smell of his favourite ittar, a confused mixture of rose and jasmine, and his guest with large, searching eyes, scanning the place for something familiar.

She puts down her bag, moves towards Baghi and holds out her hand. Baghi observes her hand, hesitates before taking it. When was the last time he had shaken hands with a woman? This was not the kind of town where people shook hands with women, not the kind of neighbourhood where people left single women in bachelors’ quarters to be entertained. Her handshake is determined and it forces him to look her in the face.

Ruin, he thinks, she is going to ruin us.

In five years of teaching English to sons and daughters of peasants and shopkeepers, Baghi has developed a revolutionary technique: single words spring up to describe a moment in life. In order to teach these students, you didn’t need proper sentences. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and qualifying adverbs could wait. Usually, a word was enough to describe a given situation, an intention or, in this case, a sense of impending doom.

Baghi rarely gets to say that he was right because it has been proven, often enough, from matters of politics to affairs of the heart, that he was almost always wrong. Later it would turn out that he was right in this moment when he forgets all the flourishes of a successful English tutor and a closet revolutionary, looks at her and comes up with the perfect word: ruin.

Baghi doesn’t much care for the native language tradition which has evolved many ways of describing a face, especially a woman’s face — in fact, most of classical poetry was devoted to capturing a woman’s features. Snakes and wine goblets featured prominently. You looked for wine goblets in the eyes, poisonous vipers in the hair, and the face was always book-like. To Baghi’s enduring irritation, nobody ever said which book, a slim T.S. Eliot volume or a copy of the Original and the Biggest Heer. The English language, Baghi believed, was more accommodating, more precise, yet more expansive.

You could do away with wine goblets and coiling, hissing snakes; you could just say her nose was sharp and quivered gently when she breathed, a little dimple on the left cheek, which still had baby fat, set off a mole on the right cheek. If he was into women, he would say she could probably set anybody’s bed on fire and turn their life to ashes by loving them and then abandoning them to waste away their life writing below-average poetry, invoking as many snakes and broken goblets as they pleased.

Baghi had wanted to do many things in life: bring a violent revolution, make the rich suffer, give all the peasants’ children a world-class education. But right now he was content doing small courtesies; he was going to ask his lady guest to have a seat and politely inquire if they had met in a past life.

But before he can say it, she plonks her bag on the floor and takes a seat. He offers her tea, he offers her water. She refuses with a wave of her hand and sits on the chair; she looks towards the ceiling, the bookshelf, the blackboard, then speaks suddenly, and while native poets may have heard a koel cooing, Baghi only hears a dry-throated, husky voice which some men with unresolved sexual urges might find desirable, a voice defeated but refusing to surrender, the voice of someone ready to get up and go looking for a fight again.

“Do you often entertain his friends?” The question sounds like an accusation to Baghi.

“No,” Baghi says. “Not like this.” He fingers his buttoned-up collar, stutters and finds himself defending his friend and landlord Maulvi Rafique’s character, not that his character needs defending: he is a man of God, a rising star of the spiritual marketplace; people offer him mutton qorma and cash in advance to listen to him telling them how to live their lives and how to prepare for the afterlife.

She is waiting, still looking at him, as if urging him to explain his life as the entertainer of stray women.

“I mean, sometimes we have friends over, common friends, and we talk, but if you are asking if he has brought a woman to my academy, I would have to say no. This is an institution of learning and not a…”

She is not listening to him any more. She is the kind of woman who tunes out when a man starts to bullshit. That’s one of the many reasons on Baghi’s list for staying away from women.

“I didn’t know he was the Bhutto type,” she says.

“Not a good day to be his jiyala,” Baghi says.

“There never was a good day to be a jiyala,” she says, looking up at him, expecting him to say more.

“He’s a maulvi, offering prayers for the dead is his job.” Baghi shrugs.

Baghi doesn’t like to talk politics with women… He has learnt his lesson and likes to keep his affairs away from female comrades.

“Can I get you something cold or maybe a hot drink?”

Repeating oneself is the essence of life. When he tells this to his students, he attributes it to Virginia Woolf but he is not sure if she ever said it. That is under the category of Things Virginia Woolf Might Have Said, an evolving list in his teaching career. The bourgeois comrade who caught him in the study circle also accused him of never having read a word written by a woman. Baghi is trying to prove her wrong.

“Water,” his guest says.

Baghi takes out one of the two glasses he keeps aside for guests. Students drink from plastic tumblers — no casteism in this academy, no hierarchies, but they are young and careless and Baghi has no patience for glass shards in the feet and blood on the floor. She accepts it without a word, gulps it down in one go.

“And how do you know Maulvi sahib?” He is deferential and doesn’t call him Molly in his absence as he has called him to his face since they were children… Molly used to bristle when he started calling him Molly but Baghi could tell that he secretly enjoyed it. He was his Molly boy before he became a serious scholar of religion who accepted cash only for his sermons and refused to eat farm-bred chicken and knew people who could spring you from a police dungeon.

She looks at Baghi as if trying to decide if she should lie to him or just slap him. “I pray behind him. This is the only mosque where women can pray but you wouldn’t know because you don’t believe in God.” Baghi is startled. He doesn’t believe in God but over the years he has learnt to keep his non-faith to himself and his academy students. She has probably heard it from Molly.

“He’s a friend, more like an elder brother to me. There was a fire at my house so he offered to put me up, temporarily,” she says and watches him for a reaction.

Molly has friends? Baghi knows that he has followers, many, many followers, worshippers who prostrate behind him feverishly, broken people trying to put themselves back together, repentant paedophiles, proud murderers, lovers, addicts, heartless traders, all flock to him for salvation. Baghi believes he is the only friend Molly has, the only one who refuses to pray behind him or anyone else. But no, Molly has another friend-sister who is here sitting in his chair, a friend with hazel eyes and roasted-wheat skin who has landed in the academy with an oversized sports bag because, obviously, Molly has no other place to take her.

Does Mrs Molly know that her much-respected husband — my god on this earth, my companion, my protector, mera sohna — has a lady friend-sister who is sitting in the same compound a few metres away?

The mosque loudspeaker turns on and Molly’s friend-sister seems surprised at the proximity of the electric crackle and the piercing sound of prayers that follows. She takes her dupatta and covers her head, probably realizing for the first time that she’s sitting in a mosque, in Allah’s own house.

“You don’t remember me?”

Baghi is blank for a moment. “Were you a student? I would have remembered.”

“Not to worry. I was here only for two weeks. I failed. Are you still a good English teacher?”

Nobody has ever asked him that. Nobody. Because they all know that he is the best there is. They might also say that teaching English is the only thing he is good at. The revolutions he had hatched lay in dust. The Mazdoor Militia he had started folded after one industrial action with two dead and even the defunct militia expelled him after his open letter to Ummah. Brief visits to police lock-ups and picnics in shabby rehabs were all in the past.

But yes, he is good at something. Something useful. Send a peasant’s son to Baghi’s Rebel English Academy, a young boy who can’t even call his own cow ‘cow’ in English, and within three months he would write a perfectly composed essay called ‘Our Cow’ that would get him passing grades in high school. Send him for another three months and he might get a job as a clerk, six months and he might pass the police recruitment exam and become an official torturer.

“I try. This is the most I can do, I just help them.” He doesn’t tell her that some of them go on to become police officers and diplomats. He is trying to be humble like you should be with a young woman you have just met. You are supposed to rub your own nose in the dust in the hope she will pick you up by the scruff of your neck and say, oh come on, don’t be humble. She has no such plans. She sits there waiting for him to pick himself up.

“Some of my students have become UN diplomats — one almost became a foreign secretary. But they were hard-working children, no credit to me.”

She has no interest in his glorious career where he grooms future UN diplomats. “I failed my English in FA,” she says as if he was personally responsible for her failure. “Second division for every subject and F for English. Zero, anda.” She makes an egg with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand. “I went to college for a year on sports quota. District gold medal in 400 yard hurdles.’”

“I am sorry to hear that,” he says. He doesn’t remember her name but it seems rude to ask her now so he continues. “I wish you had stayed longer than two weeks because the system I have devised —”

He gets an appreciative smile out of her but then she cuts him off mid-sentence. “I used to come with my friend. My friend became a doctor and she says you gave her a new life, English life. Now she lives in Norway. Maybe you should try teaching me again.”

Baghi blushes. And also panics. “Are you planning to stay?”

Excerpted with permission from English Rebel Academy by Mohammed Hanif, published in Pakistan by Maktaba-i-Danyal

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, February 22nd, 2026

While the overarching subject involves jinns and the dangers of demonic possession, each novella is distinctly different from the others. The first contains a mild-mannered male protagonist, Rahim, while the central characters of the other two are women. All three pieces of writing, however, are united in noting how the world of the jinns can impact that of humans, often with consequences that are problematic, to say the least, and downright disastrous at worst.

Rahim Shamsi is perhaps my favourite character in the book. A taciturn child, he is initially treated coldly by a domineering father and stifled by a simple, gentle mother. His mother fears that he is prone to possession by jinn influences, simply because he has an extra finger on one hand. Polydactyly is a relatively harmless condition caused by a genetic mutation, but Rahim’s relatively uneducated mother can be excused for not knowing the scientific logic underlying the existence of multiple fingers on her child’s hand.

Although Rahim is shy and withdrawn, he shows absolutely no active signs of demonic possession during his childhood or in his taxing adolescence (which takes place at a cadet college devoted to strict discipline). His father is responsible for packing him off to the aforementioned school, so that Rahim can toughen up, become more manly, and abandon his dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

One evening, Rahim and his friends exchange stories about jinns and demonic influences; this is fairly typical behaviour for young people thrown together on a stormy night. His close friend, Salman, believes that a scientific rationale underpins what many term jinn activity. This point becomes increasingly significant later in the novella.

Excelling at the study of biology, Rahim settles for becoming a dentist as opposed to a veterinarian, a decision that pleases his father, who acquires office space for him, where he can begin his clinical practice. Although Rahim works with skill and diligence, things begin to go awry quite soon.

He finds that there is ‘something not quite right’ about several of his patients. Some of them do not exhibit the bodily proportions of normal human beings, yet others have entire alternative universes within their mouths and, in a particularly jaw-dropping scene, all the family members of one of his patients drop their lower jaws to an utterly freaky extent!

My hat goes off to Rahim for remaining persistent about his career in the face of overwhelming (not to mention supernatural) odds. Rather unexpectedly, it is his hitherto cold and difficult father who comes to his help by attempting to figure out if the clinic is haunted in some tangible sense of the word. Less unexpectedly, his old school chum Salman also helps Rahim understand why he might be plagued by such unusual career hurdles.

The novella builds up its various characters admirably, and Ayesha Muzaffar is to be credited for attending to the development of both major and minor characters with an equal degree of care and skill. The novella is set in Lahore, and Muzaffar’s thorough knowledge of, and familiarity with, this historic city makes for an authentic and enjoyable backdrop.

The vibration climbed up his arms. The sweat from his brow trickled into his eyes. The cavity had no end. He changed bits. Increased speed. Switched angles. The cavity consumed it all. It was like digging into a black sun — nothing pushed back. His hands began to tremble. He glanced up once — just once — and the three of them were still staring. Still watching. Mouths dangling like broken ornaments. He nearly dropped the drill. — Excerpt from the novel

Muzaffar demonstrates even greater authorial prowess in the novella following this one, titled Finding Faraz. Also set in Lahore, although the latter part of this work is heavily reliant on supernatural themes, it is, in essence, a love story, carefully crafted by the writer.

Faraz and Farwah meet at college in Lahore, fall in love, and marry in spite of his family’s disapproval. Fate intervenes cruelly, and Faraz falls victim to a traffic accident a few years later. In a rather spooky turn of events, his body is never found, and hence Farwah receives no closure insofar as this major crisis is concerned. Although she eventually remarries and has children, she gradually becomes unhinged, imagining that she is seeing her late husband on various occasions.

Her kind but prosaic second husband, Basit, realises that something is seriously preying on Farwah’s peace of mind. Her frailty and increasing ill-health cause him to turn to religious sages and seers in order to ‘cure’ his wife. I will not spoil the story by giving away its denouement, but I can certainly state that those readers who are looking for thrills and chills related to possession by jinns will definitely not be disappointed.

My personal favourite of the three novellas, however, is the final (and shortest) one, The Possession of Bareera Khurram. In spite of the fact that this is set in Karachi, not Lahore, and is only a third of the length of the other two novellas, I don’t believe that my primary reason for liking it is because I am a Karachiite. Rather, it is its unexpected plot-twist at the end that makes it come across as a work of genius. I do not use the term ‘genius’ lightly, since it is well-established lore to assume that superior creative pieces are inspired by ‘genies’ (the word is etymologically related to ‘genius’) or ‘jinns’!

Bareera is an elite Karachi-based woman whose husband sends her to a therapist in order to help get to the root of her delusions and aberrant behaviour. Her therapist appears to be a shrewd and capable woman who is sincere about helping her patient. As the story unfolds, one finds, much to one’s horror, that the therapist is as much in danger of forces beyond her control as is Bareera herself!

By moving beyond the genre of the short story, Ayesha Muzaffar has expanded her vistas in a manner that will prove to be truly satisfying for her numerous fans. Her prose is simple and crisp, and I was impressed by how rapid and engrossing the pace of her writing was in this riveting collection of novellas. Perhaps the only criticism I can come up with is that jinns are not wholly evil beings (even the Holy Quran indicates that some are devout Muslims), and therefore the book presents a somewhat skewed perspective on these paranormal entities.

However, it is possible that Muzaffar wishes, by means of her authorial agenda, to underscore that the world of the jinns should never be taken lightly. In this, she succeeds, since her tales are nothing if not cautionary. While the book will undoubtedly delight fans of the horror genre, the sobering fact that all three of these remarkable stories are loosely based on real events will cause many readers to think twice before dabbling in the occult.

And perhaps that’s not such a bad thing, in aggregate.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 15th, 2026

No marriage is the same, just as no two people are, and the books below demonstrate the metamorphosis of marriages and their impact on the families born of them.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

“A woman’s only human… she’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less.”

An American Marriage is a novel about Roy and Celestial Hamilton, a newly married couple whose lives are torn apart after Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The story centres around how these characters navigate their relationship through difficult times whilst dealing with their own traumas and attempting to understand who they are as individuals.

Roy is a charming, middle class young man who falls in love with Celestial, an artist who comes from a wealthy family. Roy aspires to achieve the quintessential American dream — big house, beautiful family and success. The burden of class and race weigh heavily on him. Celestial, a dreamer, has a different mindset, dealing with her own past and finding her place as a successful black artist in America.

The story lays bare the agonising death of a warm and loving relationship yet also the beginnings of new and hopeful ones. Even though Celestial and Roy’s story is far from the picture perfect marriage one would hope for, it highlights that marriage is fragile, breakable and what I liked most about the story is that apart from being very relevant, the love story does not exist in a bubble or a vacuum — the characters are very much affected by society and their environment.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

“No marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is it’s own world.”

Sorrow and Bliss is about Martha, a vibrant and clever writer, and her struggle with her mental health. She has an adoring husband who has loved her since they were children. When he walks out on her, Martha is lost and wishes she was ‘normal’ like other people and wasn’t plagued by overpowering emotions.

Martha must heal and love who she is whilst accepting her circumstances. The love story is simple yet profound, delivering the everlasting message that it is impossible to love another person without loving yourself first.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

“Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together… It was as simple and complicated as that.”

This is a fun, light novel about 39-year-old Alice, who, after a bad fall at the gym, loses her memory of the past 10 years. Believing she’s 29, newly married and not yet a mother, Alice’s fresh and carefree outlook towards life is something ‘older’ Alice could re-learn.

What Alice Forgot is about two people, burdened by everyday life and whose marriage is falling apart, who need to reset and re-evaluate their priorities. An eye opener for those who are stuck in the mundanity of marriage and everyday life.

This is a story about how love changes and evolves, and sometimes slips quietly into the background becoming second to everything else. Alice and Nick’s journey teaches readers about the importance of revival and the need for survival of love in a marriage.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

Marilyn and James Lee have their world turned upside down when their favourite child commits suicide. Everything I Never Told You is a story about grief, loss and how dysfunctional family narratives can have a deep impact on generations to come.

It is a novel about dreams unfulfilled, identities unexplored, and children misunderstood and ignored. There are no happy endings here, just moving on and reconciling with the fact that you may never know or not care enough to know how deeply lonely and unhappy a person can be.

Readers witness the tragic reality of a parent’s guilt that is neverending, which then continues to chip away at and destroy a marriage and shatter the deep bonds between family.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”

A story about two broken people running from themselves and their traumas to find solace in each other. Cleo, 24, is a beautiful and broke artist living in Manhattan on the last few days of her student visa. She meets Frank, a successful 45-year-old while exiting a party. Sparks fly between them, and readers are drawn into a thrilling passionate romance that quickly leads to marriage so that Cleo can get her green card.

Though it is a marriage of convenience, the two are deeply and hopelessly in love and the beauty of their connection is evident. However, as the story progresses, the flaws of these two characters begin to unveil in a very raw and vulnerable manner — Frank is highly dependent on alcohol, and Cleo is battling depression.

There are secondary characters in the novel that contribute to the storyline and help Cleo and Frank on their journey of healing and love. Frank and Cleo’s story is evidence that some profound attachments are strong enough to outlast a marriage.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is one of the best modern day love stories I have read. It hides none of the ugliness in a marriage and highlights the miseries that infect relationships today.

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Ryan and I are two people who used to be in love. What a beautiful thing to have been. What a sad thing to be.”

After I Do is about Ryan and Lauren whose marriage is falling apart. Trying to save it, they come up with a plan to spend a year apart without any contact to see if they can find their way back to each other. They realise that marriage, even though a conventional and traditional institution, cannot be dealt with using a traditional streamlined approach. Each relationship is different, and every couple must discover their own boundaries and what they want from their partner.

This was a sweet, lighthearted read with a heartwarming ending. While the other novels in the list have more volatile relationships with extreme settings, I have included this book in the list because it highlights the importance of boundaries, which are imperative for any healthy relationship to survive.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

“Perhaps that’s what it is, this feeling never experienced before, elation, excitement, a furious kind of happiness. Perhaps this is love.”

Beth and Frank are content in their quiet life in the countryside. However, their world is disrupted when an accidental shooting brings Gabriel, Beth’s first love, back into her life. He’s a man who is the stark opposite of her gentle husband Frank, a man who challenged her, pushed her limits and loved her with abandon.

Along with Gabriel, there is his son Leo who reminds Beth of her own son whom she lost a few years earlier. The novel poignantly explores the impact of grief and the wedge it creates in a genuinely blissful union and how the intensity of an unrequited love can change the trajectory of a person’s life.

This one’s for lovers of pining romance and historical fiction.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

While all of the other books on this list have essentially positive messages and illustrate how to navigate relationships in a somewhat meaningful manner, Gone Girl is the stark opposite.

Nick and Amy Dunne are a seemingly happily married couple, until one day Amy goes missing and the police suspect foul play, making Nick the prime suspect.

The story unfolds with plenty of twists and turns and we uncover the dark and ugly side of marriage, where obsession is mistaken for love, as well as the extreme lengths a partner can go to to completely and deceptively mould themselves to fit into another’s world and hide who they truly are. With a highly dysfunctional and toxic protagonist, Gone Girl is a must read!

Set in the princely state of Hyderabad Deccan, the novel revisits a place often sidelined in mainstream narratives of the British Raj and Partition. It provides a textured, intimate portrayal of a world shaped as much by memory as by loss. Athar does not attempt spectacle; his strength lies in layering, in creating depth in his characters, in addition to language and historical awareness.

From the very first pages, it is clear that this is a novel that takes its readers seriously and asks them to pay attention to subtleties rather than grand gestures. The book opens with a note from the author that serves almost as an invitation, gently guiding the reader into the story’s geography and emotional terrain.

Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.

One of the most compelling aspects of this historical richness is the attention paid to language. The state’s capital Hyderabad is depicted not only as a city of wealth and political significance but also as a place with a unique linguistic and cultural identity.

Dakhani, which I had previously known only as a dialect, is presented as a fully realised language in the novel. Through dialogue and everyday interactions, the story illustrates how Dakhani carries centuries of history, memory and cultural pride. This attention to linguistic detail adds layers of authenticity, making the city feel lived-in and complex. Language in Forty Days of Mourning is not just a means of communication; it is a vessel of memory and identity.

At the centre of the story is Saleema, a protagonist who immediately challenges assumptions. Wealthy, sharp-edged and emotionally guarded, she initially comes across as snobbish, which feels deliberate and familiar, given its realism. Athar does not attempt to soften her for the reader’s comfort, and Saleema is complex and contradictory from the very beginning. Her wealth creates distance between her and those around her, but it also functions as a shield, hinting at experiences of loss, obligation and survival beneath the surface.

The novel is set during the uneasy year after the British left, when Hyderabad briefly existed as its own independent state. Life goes on, but under a constant sense of waiting, waiting for decisions, for war, for things to fall apart. Political negotiations drag on, rumours spread through streets and homes, loyalties are tested, and fear quietly seeps into everyday routines.

As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.

As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.

Within the first few chapters, we see Saleema interacting with her husband and her family, which complicate our initial impressions and begin to reveal emotional layers that are not immediately apparent. If these moments are insufficient to fully convince the reader of her complexity, the narrative later delves into her backstory, revealing motivations, insecurities and the personal history that informs her present behaviour.

Athar does not justify her actions, and neither does he ask the reader to excuse them. He provides context, allowing empathy to develop without demanding approval. It is a subtle yet significant distinction that demonstrates the author’s careful attention to character psychology.

Athar’s writing is another strength of the novel. The prose is measured, deliberate and restrained, never overreaching or indulgent. Scenes are allowed to unfold naturally, and silences carry as much weight as dialogue. There is a rhythm to the narrative, especially when history and memory intersect, and this makes the reading experience immersive.

Hyderabad Deccan emerges not merely as a backdrop but as a character in its own right. The streets, the buildings and the everyday life of the capital are all integrated into the story, influencing the people who live there and reflecting their histories, anxieties and desires.

The novel’s historical elements are woven into daily life rather than presented as exposition. References to the British Raj, Partition and the political uncertainty surrounding Hyderabad surface organically in conversations, traditions and silences. The novel captures how history persists in private lives, shapes relationships, and continues to resonate long after the events themselves have passed.

This approach makes the past feel intimate and personal rather than distant and abstract. The reader is invited to experience history as lived experience rather than as a series of dates and events.

Even the book’s cover contributes to the narrative experience. The bright yellow background and the striking red eyes immediately draw one’s attention. The eyes feel watchful, almost confrontational, mirroring the story’s emotional undercurrents. They demand that the reader engage with them, much as the novel itself does.

The cover is visually striking but also thematically resonant. It sets the tone for the story inside, signalling that this is not a conventional or safe narrative but one that examines grief, memory and human complexity with honesty and care.

What is most refreshing about Forty Days of Mourning is that it centres on a woman’s inner world unapologetically. Saleema is not written to be likeable or to provide comfort to the reader. She is allowed contradiction, anger, grief and quiet moments of reflection. Her emotional life is complex and layered. In focusing on her experiences, the novel resists reducing her to her relationships or her social roles alone.

It allows the reader to sit with her, to witness her inner life, and to understand her as a fully realised human being. In a literary landscape where women’s complexity is often softened or simplified, this focus feels quietly radical.

The novel is also remarkably patient. It does not rush to reveal everything about its characters or setting. It trusts the reader to notice subtleties, to observe behaviour, and to draw connections between the past and the present.

Even small gestures or conversations carry significance. Saleema’s silences, choices, and interactions are given space to breathe. The novel builds its emotional resonance gradually, which makes the impact of its revelations all the more powerful.

At the end of the day, Forty Days of Mourning is a debut that is confident, layered and assured. It invites the reader to reflect on history, engage with a city that has often been overlooked, and witness a woman’s emotional life in all its complexity. It is a novel that lingers, quietly but persistently, long after the final page has been read. Saleema’s presence, Hyderabad’s streets, and the weight of history remain in the mind.

This is a book that reminds readers why literature matters. It does not seek to entertain with spectacle or drama. Instead, it engages the intellect, empathy and the imagination. For a debut novel, Athar has delivered something rare, thoughtful and lasting.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 1st, 2026

Malfoy, played by actor Tom Felton in the films of JK Rowling’s books, has surged in popularity due to the Chinese translation of his surname — Ma-er-fu. Meaning horse and fortune, it bodes well for China’s lunar year of the Horse.

Social media has been flooded with images of people sticking red Malfoy posters on their doors. Fans can buy four of them for 11 yuan ($1.60) on e-commerce platform Taobao.

“Year of the Horse’s blessing, so stick on a Malfoy,” said one user on China’s Rednote.

Other posts on the social media platform appeared to show a massive image of Malfoy in his uniform hanging across several floors of a shopping mall in central Henan province.

The Harry Potter franchise is incredibly popular in China, where foreign films make up a relatively small percentage of the box office due to strict quotas and a shift to local content.

Warner Bros WBD.O has agreed to develop a “Harry Potter Studio Tour” in Shanghai with Chinese group Jinjiang International, Jinjiang said last year.

A Universal Studios theme park in Beijing features “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”, a section dedicated to Harry Potter-themed rides and attractions.

The eight Harry Potter films were re-released in Chinese cinemas in 2024.

“Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people — a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi, a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.”

Those sentences tell you almost everything about the book’s method. The first line is plain, almost a documentary. A boy alone. A city named. No drama. Then, the second sentence slips inward. Not people, but forces. Not faces, but pressure. A crowd. A hand. Then, the hand is gone. The language enacts what it describes. Memory thins. What remains is sensation rather than story.

The third sentence is where the knife turns. The adult voice intrudes, quietly correcting the child’s recollection. The bazaar was not that crowded. Rawalpindi was small enough that a lost child should have been found. The implication is unbearable in its restraint. If he was not found, perhaps he was not lost. Perhaps he was abandoned.

From this first paragraph, Mueenuddin is telling us that power in this world will not announce itself loudly. It will work through absence, through what fails to happen. The boy is not struck, not chased, not spectacularly harmed. He is simply not retrieved. And the rest of the book will follow the consequences of that small, devastating fact.

Mueenuddin’s first novel arrives already shadowed by the acclaim that greeted his story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It does not retreat from the terrain that made his reputation. It expands it. What he offers is not a single dramatic arc but a social anatomy, a patient examination of how power is inherited and enforced across decades in Pakistan. The result is neither melodrama nor polemic, but a grave, clear-eyed study of how people live inside systems that modernise without ever truly changing.

The book announces its ambitions at once. It opens with a list of principal characters, complete with birthdates, educations and careers. Some studied abroad. Others emerge from the bazaars and fields of Punjab. At the book’s moral centre stands Yazid, also called Bayazid, first encountered as a small boy alone in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the mid-1950s. He is barefoot, holding a pair of cheap plastic shoes, and does not remember how he came to be abandoned.

Taken in by a tea-stall owner, he grows up among regulars who teach him to read and to watch people carefully. Yazid is bright, sociable, physically imposing, and a natural intermediary between classes. Over time, he becomes a driver and fixer for powerful families, respected but never secure, indispensable yet never equal.

Around Yazid, Mueenuddin builds the novel in four interlinked movements, each advancing in time and shifting perspective. The first traces Yazid’s apprenticeship in a world where hierarchy is absorbed almost instinctively. The second centres on Rustom, a young landowner educated in America who returns in the 1980s to revive an estate his father neglected. Rustom arrives with ideas shaped by his years abroad. He believes in reform and legality. Yet, the countryside he re-enters is governed by older logics.

The third movement turns inwards, into the marriage of Hisham Atar and his wife, Shahnaz. They are members of the elite, owners of farms and factories, equally at home in Lahore and London. Their courtship began in America, where Shahnaz was first involved with Hisham’s gentler brother. She chose Hisham instead, opting for Pakistan and the closer proximity to power that choice entailed. Mueenuddin renders their relationship without sentimentality.

The novel’s final and longest section follows Saqib, a servant’s son raised on the Atars’ estate and mentored by Yazid. Bright and ambitious, Saqib is taken into the household as a kind of project. He learns quickly, anticipating needs, absorbing the manners of power. When he is given responsibility for a section of farmland, he experiments with modern agriculture.

The venture is profitable. But Saqib wants more than success within the system. He wants independence. His attempt to step beyond the role assigned to him drives the novel toward its bleakest reckoning. The outcome feels structurally inevitable. The system tolerates small ambition. It does not forgive miscalculation.

What binds these narratives is not plot but a shared moral climate. Mueenuddin’s Pakistan is a place where modernisation coexists with feudal logic, where old hierarchies are not dismantled but retooled.

Mueenuddin’s style reinforces this vision. His prose is spare, exact, rarely ornamental. A drink of water tastes as if it “had electricity in it.” A face is sketched in a few strokes that carry both physical and moral weight. Critics have compared him to Chekhov, and the likeness is instructive. Like Chekhov, he is attentive to how people are shaped by circumstance and custom, by small accidents that alter a life without announcing themselves as turning points. A phone call not made, a device newly owned, a glance misread can redirect a fate. Yet, the novel is not merely sociological. Its power lies in the intimacy of its scenes.

Mueenuddin understands the emotional economy of servitude, how affection, resentment, gratitude and calculation coexist in relationships that are never equal. The guarded marriage of Hisham and Shahnaz carries weight without tipping into melodrama. Even moments of dry humour deepen rather than soften the portrait.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives is more expansive and more assured than the stories that first established Mueenuddin’s reputation. If there is a reservation to be voiced, it may be that Mueenuddin’s control is almost too complete. The novel is composed with such steadiness that one occasionally wonders what his voice might sound like if it allowed itself more disorder, more risk.

Yet, that very discipline is also the source of its authority. The book refuses easy villains and easy consolations. It does not sentimentalise suffering, nor does it flatter the reader with moral comfort.

In the end, This Is Where the Serpent Lives offers something rarer than topical relevance. It provides a layered portrait of a society in motion. It asks how people make choices inside systems that reward compromise and punish deviation. Quietly and patiently, it makes visible the structures that shape lives, then steps back, leaving the reader to reckon with what has been seen.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 1st, 2026

Organised by Oxford University Press Pakistan, this year’s festival will explore the theme “Literature in a Fragile World”, examining how stories, poetry, and critical thought respond to social, political, and cultural uncertainty and change.

“In an increasingly fractured world, literature remains one of the last spaces where dogmas can be questioned, and humanity can speak to itself without fear,” said OUP Pakistan Managing Director Arshad Saeed Husain, reflecting on the festival’s purpose.

This year, the festival will host over 200 delegates from eight countries, featuring more than 90 sessions, 28 book launches in three languages, two documentaries, and two feature films.

Keynote speakers include Senator Sherry Rehman, Mohammed Hanif, Nasir Abbas Nayyar, and Khurshid Rizvi, alongside a distinguished lineup of writers, poets, critics, and thinkers from Pakistan and abroad.

The 17th edition of the festival will bring together a diverse group of of writers, thinkers, and literature enthusiasts, including celebrated director Sharmeen Obaid‑Chinoy, Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC (Hon), one of the world’s leading thinkers on law and the impact of artificial intelligence, Scottish historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple, and novelist Laline Paull.

New features this year include The Great KLF Debate, Sindhi Mushairo, and an interschool debate reinforcing the festival’s commitment to youth engagement, linguistic diversity, and civic dialogue. The programme also includes dramatic renditions, classical music performances, theatre, rap, and qawwali, woven seamlessly into literary discourse.

The festival features a special session celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, including the screening of Jinnah introduced by filmmaker Jamil Dehlavi, as well as a panel exploring Allama Iqbal’s thought, poetry, and continuing relevance. A session celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth is also a part of the programme.

A Youth Pavilion will offer storytelling, theatre, and hands-on workshops for younger visitors.

The festival will also announce the winners of the 2026 KLF–Getz Pharma Book Prizes, recognising outstanding works in English fiction, Urdu prose, and poetry.

The novel is about crimes that nobody wants to confront. The author in conversation with Taha Kehar, the author of No Funeral for Nazia and Typically Tanya, at T2F on Friday spoke about various aspects of his book that made one cringe.

The book’s protagonist, Dr Zurain Shah, is a respected criminology professor with a secret double life. He is disgraced and imprisoned after a scandal exposes his other side. But the twist in this story comes when he is unexpectedly recruited by Inspector Akbar Khan, the man who arrested him in the first place. He needs Dr Zurain to help him solve sexually motivated crimes that the police are ill-equipped to handle. From harassment and domestic abuse to flesh rings and cults, Dr Zurain and the task force confront sinister and disturbing crimes, where justice comes at a personal cost.

The author was asked by the moderator what led him to write such a book to which he said that it was initially just one story, which later became the first case in the book. “I wanted to examine relationships that would shock you, relationships that people frown on, live-in relationships, tinder meetings, and how such relationships can turn abusive,” Samejo explained.

“My protagonist, Dr Zurain, meanwhile, is showing the world that he is like any other person, pointing out the flaws not in himself but in society. But he is really like a dark, perverted mirror to society,” he added.

When asked about the research that went into the book by Kehar, who observed that the author was neither a criminologist nor a police officer, Samejo said that there have been instances where he consulted people within the police’s crime branch.

“There is also the Pakistan Penal Code to study, though I feel that it is not fully equipped to handle all crimes, such as the spine-chilling and blood-curdling ones that are part of my book,” he said.

He also said that he is very good at writing about bad guys and their thought processes and actions. “I work on my stories using the ‘what if?’ method. For instance, there may be a character of a sports enthusiast, who may also be a cannibal,” he said.

As observed by Kehar, women are at the heart of every case in the book to which Samejo was of the opinion that there are women’s rights being violated and trampled upon all over the world, which is painful and heartbreaking. “We are seeing that in the narrative of society,” he said, adding that he also wanted to show the misunderstandings people have about the word ‘consent’.

“For instance in the aftermath of a crime involving a woman, people say things such as, ‘Why did she speak to him?’, ‘Why was she wearing this or that?’, ‘What was she doing there at that time?’ These people only stop judging victims if they are people who are related to them or whom they care about,” he said.

The moderator also observed that violence in the book can be very startling and unsettling for the reader. To that, the author of The Special pointed out that he himself felt the discomfort when writing it.

“It was unsettling for me also to know that what I am writing will unsettle others. But the characters who are being wronged in my book are human beings who need to be written about as they deserve better,” he said.

Originally published in Dawn, January 31st, 2026

In a video shared on Instagram, Bhutto sits on a couch with her dog Coco by her side and a copy of the book in her hand, explaining that the memoir grew out of a period in her life she was deeply ashamed of — a coercive relationship she stayed in far longer than she believes anyone ever should.

“I didn’t want to write it because I was ashamed, very ashamed,” she said, adding that she had been “broken in certain ways” and looking for something to fix her. “It took a long time to realise that I had to fix myself and save myself.”

Bhutto said she decided to write the book because she suspected other women feel the same way — ashamed and unable to talk about what they’ve experienced — and that silence keeps people stuck in harmful situations longer than they should be.

“I think we have to talk about it so fewer people spend time in those situations,” she said.

The memoir, which has already been released in the US and is due out in the UK next month, also centres on Coco, whom Bhutto credits with helping her through her most vulnerable period. In the video, she describes the book as being about dogs and the kind of love that comes “with no strings attached”, as well as friendship in its different forms.

Previously, Bhutto had said the book also reflects on anxiety, chosen family and the slow process of rebuilding a sense of self after emotional harm. Rather than positioning the memoir as a dramatic escape story, she frames it as an account of how difficult it can be to recognise coercion while you are still inside it, and how long it can take to begin trusting yourself again.

For Bhutto, that recognition is what ultimately made the book unavoidable. She may not have wanted to write The Hour of the Wolf, but, as she puts it, staying silent no longer felt like an option.

An army officer serves as an important character in the book.

“The book starts on a certain night the people of my generation might remember. There is a famous hanging in our history,” he said in a session on the third day of the Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest at Lahore’s Alhamra. The session was moderated by Dur e Aziz Amna.

Hanif read out an excerpt from the novel titled On the Night of the Hanging, the very first chapter.

“On the night of the hanging, everything was as calm as it should be in a jail, devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims who are their loved ones which, in most cases, are the same people.” This is the opening sentence. The passage goes on to describe the atmosphere in Rawalpindi that night while the prisoner asked for a safety razor, claiming he did not want to look like a ‘mullah’ at his death. He also asked for a cigar and his Shalimar perfume.

Anyone with even the slightest bit of knowledge of the country’s political history can easily recognise the man who is going to be hanged — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Hanif recalled that he must have been in sixth or seventh grade when he and his classmates were locked in the examination hall for three or four hours after finishing their paper, not knowing what was happening outside.

“We came out and the city was dead. The streets, the people were scared but strangely excited as well. I wanted to somehow capture that adolescence when you don’t really know how the world around you works, who is the prime minister and why he is being hanged.”

The novelist said there was widespread disbelief — many believed Bhutto could not possibly have been hanged and that they were being lied to. The rest of the book, he said, is set after the hanging.

Hanif confessed that he was a lazy writer, and he had started this novel about seven years ago.

“So by the time I finished, another famous man is in prison and again there is a lot of uncertainty and rumours about what’s going to happen to that man,” he said, quickly clarifying that he was not in fact talking about “the man” the audience were thinking about, eliciting laughter.

Hanif has a habit in both his speech and writing of interjecting humour when the subject is gloomy and serious. From laughter or smiles, he pulls his readers or audience back to a serious topic. He did the same during the session when he spoke about “the young man, Junaid Safdar, who was a medical student here. Sorry, the other Junaid, Junaid Hafeez”.

He said Hafeez was on his mind because he was a bright and hardworking young man, adding that he had been halfway through his degree when he started reading books and poetry, got a Fulbright scholarship, and then returned to Pakistan. According to Hanif, Hafeez was teaching at Bahauddin Zakariya University, doing his MPhil, when he said something in his classroom — nobody was actually sure what he said — and then he was sentenced to death.

“For the last 13 years, he has been in solitary confinement and no judge is ready to listen to his appeal, and his lawyer was shot dead. Sympathetic journalists are told if you write or report about him or talk about him then he would be in further danger,” he said. Hafeez was already on death row, he said, pondering what else could happen to him.

City of Okara and the language question

During the session, Hanif was asked about OK Town, the city mentioned in the novel that was modelled off Okara, his own hometown. He said people who leave home at an early age often grow very nostalgic about it, but they are also very scared to go back to preserve their home the way it was. It never is.

“I was not born and raised in Okara, [I] grew up in a village outside Okara. The city was a place of fascination and confusion where things were done differently, which you visit once a year to buy new school books at the end of the year. It was completely fascinating; there were people who called their mother and father Mummy and Daddy, they spoke Urdu and they had drawingrooms and doorbells and stuff like that.”

Hanif said he completed his primary schooling in his village and then went to the city for high school, which was a cultural shock. The boys there would make fun of you if you told them you had three buffaloes that lived with you, he recalled. The author said he was called “Paindu Production” by one of the city boys.

“There is another thing which is always fascinating — the problem of language. I went to an Urdu-medium public school where teachers taught Urdu in Punjabi. Then there was high school where I started learning English and they taught us English in Urdu.”

Hanif said the students would go to this little tuition centre to learn English, adding that the most brilliant boys could not finish high school because they never got their heads around learning English. He spoke of the privileges of the English language.

He read out an excerpt from the novel featuring an intelligence officer, Captain Gul, who was assigned a photography detail duty on “the night of the hanging,” which he messed up and was transferred to OK Town as punishment.

The author said he was a working journalist and if he was asked to do something in Urdu, he did it in Urdu. If I am asked to do it in English, I do it in English, he said. “The people of my generation who went through public schooling had this dilemma that at home, you speak Punjabi, everybody speaks Punjabi, by the time you are five or six you have enough vocabulary. Then suddenly you go to school where the medium [of instruction] is Urdu and all the knowledge about the world you have becomes redundant and by the time you pick up Urdu, then education starts in English in college etc. That happened to almost everyone.”

He said it was fascinating to switch gears because of cultural references in Urdu and Punjabi, however, he has been accused of catering to different audiences in different languages for sales.

Rebel English Academy is being published by Maktaba-i-Danyal.

Originally published in Dawn, January 26th, 2026

The great Agatha Christie (who, due to her being married to archaeologist Max Mallowan, was based in Iraq for decades) wrote only one historical mystery — Death Comes as the End. It is set in ancient Egypt, a period that still holds sway over the minds of many.

Phillips, whose writing denotes her as implicitly being a fan of Christie’s, sets her most recent novel, The Museum Detective, in modern-day Karachi; however, the main protagonist Gulfsa “Gul” Delani is a highly qualified archaeologist whose expertise leads to her being asked by the police to examine a mummy in an ornate sarcophagus that has been located not in Egypt but in Balochistan of all places!

The novel is loosely based on a true case. About 25 years ago, the mummified body of a woman was located in the Balochistan region, and it was speculated that she might have originated from Persepolis (ancient Persia). The Iranian and Pakistani governments squabbled excitedly (and ultimately pointlessly) about which country this “major historical find” belonged to, until the mummy was proven to be a fake. Dr Asma Ibrahim, a notable Karachi museologist, had a major say in determining this.

Maha Khan Phillips’ fast-paced third novel is both historical fiction and a thrilling murder mystery. It cements her standing as a writer of great merit.

When DSP Akhtar of the Sindh Police has Dr Gul Delani examine the mummy, the expert is rather excited by the cuneiform script on the sarcophagus, as well as the rosettes and patterns on it, which all seem to indicate that the artefact might have originated in Persepolis. The Egyptians were not the only culture to have practised the art of mummification and, although professionally cautious, Gul’s thrill at being on the verge of a major historical discovery is understandable.

Phillips certainly did her homework insofar as researching mummies is concerned. She credits internationally renowned Egyptologist Dr Salima Ikram with having helped her understand aspects of archaeology that are fundamental to her novel. Ikram was a former colleague of mine (at the American University in Cairo), for whom I not only have a high level of genuine respect, but with whom I share both a Pakistani background as well as an undergraduate alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. In fact, the character of Gul herself appears to be, at least partially, based on Salima.

While no one questions Gul Delani’s expertise or her passion for her field, it is evident that she can be a bit of a “wild card”, especially since she rebelled against the strictures of her rich Memon family in order to develop an internationally sound name in the field of archaeology.

Museologist Dr Asma Ibrahim with the sarcophagus allegedly found in Balochistan in 2000, an incident that inspired the novel | Dr Asma Ibrahim

Her staid and prosaic brother, Bilal, is a hugely successful financier as well as Gul’s diametric opposite, both in terms of aspirations and ambitions as well as character and morality. However, we are told that Gul adored his daughter, Mahnaz, who disappeared in her mid-teens. To date, Mahnaz has not been found. Gul’s ongoing attempts to locate her niece create an investigation that runs parallel to her quest to determine the precise provenance of the recently discovered mummy.

Everyone, ranging from the media to the police, gets rather excited about the fact that the mummy might have been a relative of King Xerxes of the Achaemenid empire (ie of ancient Persia), more specifically his daughter Artunis. Early on in the novel, virtually every reader will keep his or her fingers crossed while hoping that Gul can prove that the mummy is a genuine Achaemenid artefact. It would be criminal for me to divulge in this review whether the mummy really is genuine or not. But Phillips’ main agenda isn’t primarily that of creating a novel based on an academic geopolitical sensation.

The quest for the whereabouts of Mahnaz is as central to Gul’s life as ascertaining the true background of Princess Artunis. Once again, I will obviously not reveal what happened to Mahnaz, but I will pay the author the sincere compliment of noting that the manner in which Artunis’ tale and Gul’s niece’s respective story dovetail is brilliantly accomplished. Phillips’s command over character development is as skilful as her graceful ability to plot and pace her writing.

Gul’s main emotional support comes not from her family, but from a Goan Christian secretary, Manora Fernandes, whom she met while establishing herself in Karachi. Aside from making excellent food, such as Goan prawn curry, the outwardly crusty (though inwardly loving) Fernandes ensures that Gul consistently receives not only snacks and sympathy from her but also sound and sensible advice.

An intensely dedicated academic, Gul battles the nepotistic and patriarchal constraints of the Heritage and History Museum where she works, to discover Artunis’ true story. Not only does Gul contact her UK-based former colleague Harry Gilbert for help, but she also visits a gentleman in Karachi’s Parsi Colony, who can help her regarding some of the more obscure historical references that have been made from time to time, underscoring why Artunis may have been forced to flee from Xerxes’ court.

Even though the book is a fast read, Phillips should be given considerable credit for attending meticulously to every major detail of her plot; there are absolutely no loose ends left by the time the novel concludes. Even minor characters, regardless of whether they are underprivileged students at a local shelter, thugs who are working for a nefarious criminal named Saaya (who appears to be interested in the money Artunis can bring on the black market), or Mahnaz’s former childhood friend, the disloyal Amal Hashwani, are depicted as carefully as major ones.

The true identity of the shadowy Saaya remains a mystery until close to the end of the novel, and although some readers might guess it correctly before the revelation, that does not detract an iota from the denouement of this thrilling and well-written book.

Although Phillips’s acknowledgements section underscores her position as an elite member of Pakistani society, beyond the veneer, her work possesses real value. When it comes to writing, she herself is “the real thing” and so it doesn’t matter much whether her mummy ultimately is or isn’t.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 18th, 2026

Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968, sold millions of copies with its thesis that advanced aliens had repeatedly visited Earth, leaving their mark in the form of Inca and Egyptian ruins, cave drawings and other physical monuments.

“It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,” the work begins. It acknowledged that scholars would dismiss it as nonsense, but insisted that “the past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primaeval earth in manned spaceships”.

‘Pseudoscience’ theories

Academics wrote books refuting his theories, criticising him as a purveyor of some of the more fantastical notions of pseudoscience. German news magazine Der Spiegel even had a 1973 cover story titled ‘The Daeniken Hoax’.

Nevertheless, legions of fans snapped up his more than 40 books and watched his television specials and documentary films. The over 70 million books that he sold were translated into more than 30 languages.

Von Daeniken spent the early part of his working life managing a hotel in eastern Switzerland, where a fraud conviction landed him in jail for 18 months. But as his book took off, he emerged from prison as a best-selling author.

Still, he never presented the smoking gun to fulfil astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. “He … says that the astonishing astronomical information ancient civilisations, such as the Mayan, had is proof that there were some space travelers around to teach it to them. This fits in with his general questioning of the ability of the Egyptians to build the pyramids, or the Easter Islanders to erect those massive stone heads,” the New York Times wrote in 1974.

“His method is to use a negative — ancient peoples couldn’t have done or thought all the things they did — to prove a positive — that the ancient people were the beneficiaries of some kind of cosmological Point 4 (development assistance) programme.” Such criticism never knocked von Daeniken off his stride.

“We owe it to our self-respect to be rational and objective,” he wrote. “At some time or other, every daring theory seemed to be a Utopia. How many Utopias have long since become everyday realities!” Television specials about his books made him a well-known figure in Europe and the United States. In 2003, he opened a Mysteries of the World theme park in Interlaken — although it went bust after three years.

Return of the Aliens

In a treatise on his website, von Daeniken said he was not an esoteric, and that his work served to debunk “a world of religious and unfortunately often scientific humbugs”. “From countless old written records, I know that these ‘gods’ promised to return. Then we will experience the god shock, a total catastrophe in religion and science. And everything would have been so easy to understand — without this god shock. The evidence speaks a clear language. That is what drives me.” The release in July 2021 of a watershed US government UFO report that did not rule out extraterrestrial origins gave him hope.

“In future, anyone who talks about UFOs and extraterrestrials can no longer simply be ridiculed. People will slowly realise that many things are possible that they previously considered impossible,” he told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper.

“As soon as we are prepared and get used to the idea that we are not alone in the universe, the extraterrestrials will come to us. I expect that to be the case within the next 10 years.”

Originally published in Dawn, January 12th, 2026

Set to launch on January 27 in the US, the book is based on Bhutto’s relationship with his little Jack Russell Terrier, Coco, who became her closest companion during her darkest times.

“It’s in the company of this loyal dog that Bhutto is finally able to examine some of her most profound personal tragedies and the complex relationships that have shaped her life”, according to a preview on Literary Hub, which the author shared on her Instagram.

From the tragic murder of her father to navigating love, a toxic, manipulative relationship, and the search for motherhood, the memoir reflects on the tumultuous bits of her life. In a social media promotion post for her upcoming memoir, Bhutto revealed how she suffered from anxiety pretty much all her life.

After having tried yoga, going vegetarian, going vegan, you name it, what actually helped with her panic attacks in her 20s were two things: her dog Coco, and welcoming the panic instead of fighting it.

“They [dogs] are somehow incredibly able to give you a love that is grounding and secure.”

The memoir centres on the themes of motherhood, art, family, and the way that a dog’s unconditional love can offer a rare opportunity for healing. Interestingly, though it also focuses on the role of friendship — specifically on how friends played their part in Bhutto’s journey of healing.

In another promotional post, Bhutto talked about friends as not just God’s apology for family but “for a lot of things”.

“I don’t think I would have survived any of my life if I weren’t incredibly lucky to have the friends that I did. And a friend once told me that friends are God’s apology for family. And I think friends are God’s apology for a lot of things,“ she said.

“Friendship is essential. Friendship is sustaining. And friendship is a bone-deep relationship. If you’re lucky to have those kinds of friends, they outlast everything else. They outlast familial ties, relationships, pets, school, whatever it is. They travel with you always.”

Hinting towards a specific friend, Allegra, she continued, “And I’ve been very lucky to have friends like Allegra who becomes many things in one.”

“I guess if you have those bone-deep friendships, there are many, many, many people in one body. And I hope I have been a good friend in the same way that friends have been to me,” Bhutto concluded.

The cover of the book is designed by Jon Gray (@gray.318 on Instagram), while Allegra took the author’s picture for the book. The picture shows Bhutto holding her terrier, Coco, who is seen peacefully sleeping in her arms.

The author has been a vocal advocate for Palestinian liberation both on social media and international forums. Last year, she co-edited an anthology titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide as part of a literary intervention aimed at documenting and resisting the ongoing annihilation of Palestinian life in Gaza.

The book lives up to its reputation in that its setting of 1915 — smack in the middle of the Great War of 1914-1918 — is delineated with marvellous authenticity. Graham situates the action on board the RMS Lusitania, a famous luxury liner that was historically torpedoed by the German U-20 submarine off the coast of the United Kingdom as it was nearing the end of its transatlantic voyage from New York to the UK.

The book’s protagonist, Patrick Gallagher, who ostensibly works for the British Paymaster General’s Office, is charged with conveying the former British vice-consul in New York, Harry Chalfont, safely to the UK. Chalfont is suspected of being a major German spy, and virtually every other major character in the novel also has a complex past. It appears likely that a German-American named Charles Schurz, who is a notable engineer with a sound knowledge of arms and armaments, may also be a spy for the Germans.

Meanwhile, William Ripley, a theatrical impresario whose plays have failed consistently, appears to be in desperate need of money. Edwin Franklin, an American industrialist as rich as Croesus, the Lydian king, comes across as a very overbearing character. He is second in unpleasantness, however, to the businessman James Dowrich, who seems to have an unsavoury hold over many of the other characters.

An element of diversity is introduced by means of a Mexican couple, Señor and Señora Lopez, who have apparently fled Spain and have got themselves embroiled in General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa’s war against the Mexican government. Villa, though not a character in the book, is central to some major elements of the plot as he and his forces, comprised of Mexican rebels, were being aided in his insurgency efforts by the US government.

In addition to the males, Dolly Markland, the wife of a rich man who is currently serving as a Canadian army officer, is portrayed as a reflective and brooding lady who seems to have a haunting, dark past.

No one is particularly surprised when the unpleasant Dowrich is found murdered in his cabin. Captain William “Bill” Turner, who is at the helm of the Lusitania, turns over the investigation to Gallagher, since the latter is, in actuality, a skilled undercover agent for the UK government. A shrewd and capable individual with superior powers of detection, Gallagher is baffled by how anyone could have killed Dowrich, especially since the door to his cabin is locked and the key is clearly within. He does eventually succeed in providing a satisfying solution to the mystery, but not before another passenger is killed. Undaunted, however, Gallagher solves that case as well.

The book is written in a clear and lucid fashion and, given Graham’s expertise, is admirably free of anachronisms and the types of errors that plague the efforts of less erudite writers. Indeed, although I am a die-hard fan of Agatha Christie’s work, I must confess that this text is a cut above Christie’s novels when it comes to the handling of a much broader historical canvas than those found in the work of the ‘Queen of Crime’.

At no point whatsoever does any member lose track of the fact that their world is in a serious state of war. Threatening and grim, the atmosphere gradually builds up over the course of the novel, to the point at which the ill-fated Lusitania gets torpedoed. In spite of Edwin Franklin’s boasts that the liner would remain protected in war-torn marine space, Graham ensures that the novel follows the course of history closely, albeit fictionally, in terms of the sequence of events.

The lifeboat lurched again, crunching into the deckhouse bulkhead and grinding another deckchair to sawdust under its keel. Gallagher climbed on to the rail and stood, balancing against the roll of the ship. “Throw me the rope!” he called to the nearest seaman. The man hesitated for a moment, then threw the free end of the heavy manila rope. Gallagher caught it in his outstretched hand just as the ship rolled back the other way. A woman screamed. The lifeboat slid across the deck and smashed into the rail just as Gallagher jumped down on to the canvas cover. — Excerpt from the novel

Although elegantly written, the book is as subversively frightening as a Stephen King novel. One of the main subplots involves Gallagher trying to figure out if artillery shells containing deadly gas are being carried in the cargo hold of the Lusitania. Anyone who is familiar with the ugly graphic imagery portrayed in Wilfred Owen’s famous poem Dulce Et Decorum Est will appreciate how horrific gas-related casualties — due to chlorine and phosgene — were in World War I.

Graham handles the interplay between characters very well when it comes to such issues. Schurz possesses the requisite scientific background to understand the manner in which these special weapons work. Señor and Señora Lopez are far less innocent than they profess to be when it comes to a knowledge of the significance of armaments, and Gallagher is too intelligent to ever trust the shifty Chalfont completely regarding any issue. Although Señor Lopez is a brilliant pianist in terms of profession, his life’s personal music score resonates with much darker undertones, metaphorically speaking.

Graham skilfully ties up all the loose ends at the end of the book, while presenting the reader with a good mystery and a superlative historical novel. The Lusitania has a special emotional significance for Gallagher, whose main romantic interest, a talented actress named Roxanne, had lost her life on the ship some years ago. Although he does not let his emotions affect his judgement, the author outlines his memories of her in a way that is genuinely poignant.

Markland’s fate and background, too, are especially tragic, a point that is further underscored by her gender. Women are depicted as especially vulnerable in this book, which is hardly surprising given that it is set in the early 1900s. Men in powerful patriarchal positions, such as Dowrich and Franklin — and even the bumbling Ripley — take it for granted that their gender confers on them the ability to treat women with contempt at best and downright brutality at worst.

In aggregate, Death on the Lusitania is an excellent period piece and will appeal to fans of both history and mystery alike.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 4th, 2026

The victim’s mother arrived in tears and went straight to a body, shrieking, “He is my ‘laal’”. Everyone was shocked, even the journalists present, because the body wasn’t identifiable at all. Except for the mother who had given birth to the boy, no other family members recognised him.

Over the decades, much like those bodies, Quetta has become unidentifiable. Violence has massacred the city’s once secular face; it was once a peaceful multicultural city made up of different ethnic groups and religions.

Like the mother of the boy killed in the bomb blast, Ali Baba Taj still saw the unblemished face of Quetta. The Hazara poet and professor, who died on November 9 in a hospital in Karachi, never stopped striving for a Quetta that belonged to all.

This was especially poignant given that he was from the Shia Hazara community, one that has long been on the receiving end of unabashed violence. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Shia Hazaras have lost their lives in sectarian violence in Quetta.

Born in Quetta in 1977, Taj was a Hazara poet known for his poetry in both Urdu and Persian. In 2007, he wrote a book of Urdu poems titled Muthi Mein Kuch Saansain. He completed his Master’s in Persian language and literature from the University of Balochistan in 2003 and chose to enter the world of teaching. A few weeks before his death, he became a full-fledged professor of Persian at the Musa Degree College in Marriabad.

Taj was known in the literary circles of Quetta, having spent his entire life contributing to the worlds of poetry and academia. He also visited India’s Kolkata in 2008 to represent Pakistan at the World Poetry Festival, when relations between the two countries still allowed for people from both sides to take part in literary exchanges.

It is interesting to note that though he was born during the dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq, he had been a progressive since his days as a student, after moving to Lahore, where one of his revolutionary comrades was Muhammad Aamir Rana, a columnist for Dawn. Rana and fellow journalist Shahzada Zulfiqar introduced me to Taj seven years ago — before that we had only known each other by name.

Taj grew up in a literary environment in Quetta, where Baloch, Pashtun, Hazara, Punjabi, and Sindhi literary figures sat together to write and discuss local literature. In the early 2000s, Taj and his friends were close to teachers Saba Dashtiari, Behram Ghouri, and Sharafat Abbas of the University of Balochistan, where he studied.

Ghouri, who taught at the journalism department of the University of Balochistan, once told me, “At the time, a Baloch would write in Balochi, a Pashtun in Pashto, Hazara in Hazaragi, and others in Brahui, Persian, Punjabi, and Sindhi while sitting together in one group. This is what defined Quetta’s literary community. However, with the deteriorating security situation, all that is gone.”

Hazaras are among many groups targeted, bombed and killed in Pakistan. Their imambargahs and markets have come under attack by banned sectarian outfit Lashar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). The community has been ghettoised into two neighbourhoods — Marriababad and Hazara town, situated on the eastern and western ends of Quetta. They are often targeted if they leave their communities.

Despite all these challenges and threats, Taj often visited his friends from the literary community in Sunni-dominated areas, much to the surprise of those friends. He eventually stopped his visits at the behest of his very worried friends who urged him to be cautious.

I once asked him how he stepped out of Marriabad when sectarian violence was at its peak. “I used to wear masks and a muffler over my face to cover my Hazara facial features, and a helmet,” he told me. “I wore the helmet not to protect my head while riding the bike, but to hide my facial features!”

Ever since I joined this newspaper, I have written about Hazara killings, and Hazara lives lost far too soon, much like Mohammed Hanif’s Baloch friends who die too young. Sometimes, I would complain to Taj that there wasn’t a single Hazara I had written about — including obituaries, who had died a natural death. Many of them are buried in the Bahist-e-Zainab cemetery in Marriabad and were killed in acts of sectarian violence.

I told him of my wish that someday, I’d be able to write about a Hazara who died a natural death, not by bullet, bomb, nor road accident. I said I was done writing over and over about deaths due to violence.

Sometimes, it felt as if he and I were only friends in the shaam (evening). We had never taken each other seriously, because most of our conversations were during the shaam time. I remember vividly when I told him this, he smiled. When he smiled wide, and later dissolved into laughter, his eyes closed in mirth.

I would realise much later that I would indeed be writing about a Hazara who died a natural death, that too a good friend, after paying my last respects at his grave.

As I sat down to write Taj’s obituary, his vivid smiling face did not appear. That is gone, like his soul, forever.

Each time, we discuss the struggles of diasporic communities and the fractures that remain the legacy of our postcolonial histories of the Subcontinent; one theme that emerges from our conversations is loneliness, often stemming from political or geographic displacement.

In Desai’s latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, loneliness is more personal and intimate, found in corridors, hospital beds, family homes, and even in conversations where characters let things remain unspoken.

I wonder if teaching this novel might become an ordeal for me; how would I guide readers through a book so emotionally dense, when loneliness is the epidemic that has quietly invaded our lives? Is there a way to read beyond the contours of loneliness and find hope — not just in the novel — but also in the way solitude may materialise in our lives?

It is the depth of loneliness that makes The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny so compelling. At the beginning of the novel, we meet Sonia, who is studying literature and creative writing at Hewitt College during Vermont’s biting winter. She works at a library, reads Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, recovers from heartbreak, and calls her parents in Allahabad on Sundays to heal from the ache of life away from home. Solitude becomes the teacher through which she writes stories for her creative writing thesis.

Later in the novel, as Sonia tends to her father in the hospital, her loneliness evolves. Desai shows Papa’s “Delhi party humour” being replaced by fragility and dependence; Sonia is a witness to her father’s suffering, and it is here in India, where her loneliness transforms. Where it was once introspective and offered some creative impetus, it is now tangible and urgent, found in her running between wards, dealing with incompetent attendants, and absorbing the painful reality of a loved one’s vulnerability.

This relational solitude also occupies the life of the other titular protagonist. A young journalist in New York, Sunny is physically present in the streets of Brooklyn but emotionally and mentally fighting battles that are thrown his way in the form of letters from across the ocean. The letters, carrying marriage proposals, the weight of tradition, and the steady demands of a widowed mother, exert a power over Sunny, threatening to rupture his relationship with his girlfriend, Ulla.

In one tense moment, when Ulla discovers the letters and the secrecy surrounding their relationship, her anger pushes Sunny to retreat; he “flee(s) for the subway”, unable to stand his ground during the confrontation. Later, he reflects on his inability to assure Ulla with any words: “He couldn’t articulate to Ulla, lest she claim to be the victim of his ambivalence, that his life now seemed at a remove, that it was sometimes unrecognisable to himself.”

In New York, Sunny is far from physically alone. Yet, his relational loneliness is profound. Caught between family, romantic love and competing loyalties, Sunny finds himself among so many who claim priority in his life without offering him the support he needs to hold him together.

His tragedy is especially poignant; despite being surrounded by those who care for him, none can bridge the gap between his inner isolation and the outward performance of stability he puts up for Ulla, his family and even his employers at the Associated Press.

Reading the passages, I couldn’t help but find echoes of Biju, the undocumented Indian worker from The Inheritance of Loss, who spends years in New York pursuing the green card not so much for himself as for his father’s pride in India. In writing Sunny, Desai reinvents displacement — it is not found across borders but merely within one’s own life.

Stylistically, Desai offers the kind of prose I aspire to teach in my writing classes. Her work is not too focused on maintaining and following the rigidities of plot; instead, she blends sharp observation with the emotional truths of her characters.

As the novel unfolds, the lives of the two protagonists move ahead in a parallel fashion, where their journeys of unpacking loneliness sometimes intersect, otherwise remain solo. There are no dramatic moments or sudden realisations that the characters undergo. Instead, in the slow pace of the novel, I not only take a tour of the spaces inhabited by the characters — spaces that Desai turns into personalities with her craft — but I also zoom into their minds and memories.

It seems as if Desai holds our hand and puts us within earshot of their interior worlds, often carrying a remorseful and mourning tone that is reminiscent of the narrator of Inheritance of Loss.

In her interview with Booker’s official website The Booker Prizes, Desai reflects that she wanted to explore “not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world — all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness.” Yet, in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, these larger concerns of politics take a backseat. Instead, the novel remains memorable for its intimate moments, like Sonia’s grandmother, Ba, sniffing the fridge to ensure honesty in the cook, bringing domestic humour and humanity to the narrative.

As the novel comes to a close, with Sonia and Sunny meeting after years of separation, there is warmth in me for having experienced a sweet romance rather than a historical reckoning or a polemic on politics. In fact, Desai’s nomination for the Booker Prize for the novel reminds us that literature today does not owe its readers any grand statements.

Instead, it can linger in our minds by unveiling the rough, messy, delicate and complex textures of everyday life and human connection amid loneliness. It is perhaps this fragile sense of hope that I may take with me into classrooms.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 28th, 2025

Lea Ypi’s second book, Indignity, lifts one of Free’s chief characters — her paternal grandmother, Leman Ypi — and reconstructs Leman’s life through a combination of archival research, memory and imagination.

Lea is jolted into this life reconstruction work when a picture of her beaming grandmother on her honeymoon, in 1941 in Cortina in the Italian Alps, is posted on social media. The picture, which Lea had not seen before, attracts internet trolls, with damaging allegations of her grandmother being a fascist collaborator.

This sets Lea on a hunt to discover the real truth about her deceased grandmother and restore her to the pedestal of dignity from the murk of indignities heaped upon her in life and beyond. The resulting search takes her to five countries and eight archives.

The upshot of her archival and imaginative labours is a sheer joy to read. The book offers rich insights into the life and times of Leman Ypi, whose remarkable life straddled the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of Albania as a newly communist state after the travails of the Italian invasion, and German occupation during the Second World War.

The book begins with a portrait of Leman’s early years in Salonica (now called Thessaloniki), the most cosmopolitan city in Greece, towards the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, in whose service some members of the Leman family, of ethnic Albanian origin, were gainfully employed.

Lea skilfully and imaginatively reconstructs the plural, cosmopolitan milieu of Salonica, composed of many cultural, religious and ethnic mansions. Lea’s portrayal of Salonica reminds me of British historian Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, which charts the rise and fall of Salonica as the most cosmopolitan and global of the Greek cities.

This traumatic and elegiac phase in the life of Salonica, when its multiethnic fabric was being forcefully undone on account of forced population transfers of Turks and Greeks, is deftly handled by Lea Ypi. What was integrated harmoniously over centuries is set to be disintegrated in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, with huge personal and political privations for those caught up in the drama of the time.

There are hints of resentment and helplessness in the face of the larger scale role of great European powers, through the Treaty of Lausanne and the League of Nations, in population transfers. The League of Nations, a creation of the US President Woodrow Wilson, rather than granting the previously Ottoman-colonised countries the right of self-determination as the key plank of the League, threw them back into the hands of new European colonisers, under the mandate administration.

Lea always lifts her narrative from personal to regional and global forces at work in the brutal unmixing of the harmoniously mixed-up population of Jews, Muslims and Christians of various ethnic and newly national affiliations.

Amid this personal and regional turmoil, in 1936, Leman — then only 18 and still single — makes a courageous decision to move to Albania, a country to which she has never been before. At the time of Leman’s arrival in Tirana, Albania is going through its own political convulsions, triggered by the successive Italian invasion and German occupation of the country, and the emergence of a national resistance movement.

Leman meets Asllan Ypi, the son of Xhafer Ypi, who served briefly as a prime minister of Albania in the early 1920s. Asllan and Leman hit it off well and soon get married. Asllan Ypi, educated in France, and friend of the future communist leader Enver Hoxa from their Paris days, is brimful of radical ideas, acquired from his stay in France.

Asllan’s political radicalism soon falls foul of the Enver-led communist government that came to rule the country after the end of the German occupation. Asllan is duly thrown in prison for his dissident political views and his alleged association with the British intelligence agents operating in Albania. Leman, too, ends up in a forced labour camp, as collateral damage.

Zafo (Xhafer Ypi), the father of the author, is the sole child of the couple (we encounter Zafo struggling to negotiate the adverse consequences flowing from his father’s political activism and incarceration in the first book Free). Lea, an academic philosopher, seems to imagine her characters as physical embodiments of certain lasting values, ideas, ideals and ideologies, for which they often pay a heavy personal price.

In Free, the characters represent some notions of feminism, civil society, neoliberalism, free market democracy, conservatism, Marxism and social democracy. The guiding and structuring concept of this book, however, is dignity. These forms cover a range of trying situations in which one’s innate sense of dignity is tested.

These actions range from Asllan’s criticism of his father’s conduct not measuring up to dignity, Xhafer Ypi’s notion of dignity as consisting in stopping the fires of chaos from spreading as an administrator, Leman’s idea of dignity as the capacity to do the right thing in the face of odds , and Lea’s maternal grandmother Mediha Hanim’s act ensuring that her husband, Ibrahim Pasha, dies a dignified death.

Interestingly, Lea accidentally stumbles upon another Leman Ypi, who is the namesake of her grandmother, in the archives. Besides restoring dignity to her own grandmother, Lea also gives the other Leman Ypi the dignity of a memorial in the final chapter of the book.

As a researcher, Lea sets great store in methodological reflections on her archival research approach and the role of archives in the construction of memory and the reconstruction of hitherto unexplored biographies. Each chapter begins with an extract from the sparse secret service archive and expands into a wider portrait of Leman’s life and times, by filling up the information gaps left in the archive through novelistic imagination and memory recall. In this way, Lea arrives at a considerably rounded view of her grandmother, which is a fitting and lasting retort to her internet trollers.

In the process, the book becomes a well-written and well-crafted gem, offering profound meditations on loss, love, memory, displacement, archival research, migration, colonialism, and European great power politics in the interwar period — issues as urgent in today’s world as they were in Leman’s times.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 7th, 2025

Madeleine Sophie Wickham, who wrote under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, revealed last year that she was receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

“We are heartbroken to announce the passing this morning of our beloved Sophie,” her family said on Instagram.

“Sophie counted herself truly blessed — to have such wonderful family and friends, and to have had the extraordinary success of her writing career,” her family said.

She published over 30 books, which have sold some 50 million copies and have been translated into over 40 languages, according to a biography on her website.

Her lighthearted writing style won fans for its humour and relatability, giving an insight into the romances, careers and financial concerns of young women.

Kinsella preferred the terms “romantic comedy” or “wit lit” over “chick lit” to describe her work.

The first two books from her Shopaholic series were adapted for the 2009 romantic comedy film Confessions of a Shopaholic starring Isla Fisher.

They tell the stories of Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist who is a serial shopper and hopeless when it comes to her own finances.

“I was really excited, it felt like a new voice,” Kinsella said of penning the series in 2000.

“I thought it was my side project. But having discovered comedy, it’s addictive,” she told The Times newspaper in 2024.

Unmatched wit

Born on December 12, 1969 in London, Kinsella had five children with her husband, Henry Wickham, whom she met as a student at the University of Oxford.

Kinsella wrote her first novel, The Tennis Party, aged 24, under her birth name, when she was herself working as a financial journalist.

In 2019, her novel Can You Keep a Secret was adapted into another romantic comedy starring Alexandra Daddario.

Her agents at The Soho Agency said, “Maddy was a once-in-a-lifetime author and friend”.

“Maddy was an intelligent, imaginative, loving and irreverent woman who valued the deeply connective power of fiction,” the agents — Araminta Whitley and Marina de Pass — said in a statement.

“She also had an unmatched wit and ability to find the funny side,” they added.

Her latest novels were The Burnout (2023) and What Does it Feel Like? (2024).

The latter is a semi-fictional account of her cancer journey, which made it onto several bestseller lists.

Bill Scott-Kerr, her longstanding publisher at Transworld, described Kinsella as “our author, our cheerleader, our fellow conspirator and our friend,” according to the BBC.

He added: “Maddy leaves behind a glorious and indelible legacy, a unique voice, an unquenchable spirit, a goodness of intent and a body of work that will continue to inspire us to reach higher and be better, just like so many of her characters.”

In an introduction to the book, Kinsella said she had “always processed my life through writing”.

“Hiding behind my fictional characters, I have always turned my own life into a narrative. It is my version of therapy, maybe.”

DC’s Superman/Spider-Man #1, a limited edition one-shot comic will be released on March 25 to mark 50 years of the industry giants working together. The two heroes were featured in DC and Marvel’s first crossover, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, back in 1976.

The latest comic follows journalists Clark Kent and Peter Parker as they chase a story for their respective newspapers. The story leads them deep into a conspiracy — led by Brainiac and Doctor Octopus — threatening to change the world. Luckily for everyone, Kent and Parker aren’t just ordinary reporters.

The comic will be written by Mark Waid, with artwork from Jorge Jimenez. Aside from the main story, the comic book will have a number of bonus stories with the following DC/Marvel pairings:

• Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson
• Jimmy Olsen and Carnage
• Superboy (Legion) and Spider-Man 2099
• Power Girl and Punisher
• Superboy Prime and Spider-Man

The comic also comes with a number of cover variants made by different DC comic artists.

Superman/Spider-Man #1 is just one part of the festivities surround the 50th anniversary celebrations for DC and Marvel; special collectors’ reprints of the original 1976 crossover, Treasury Edition 50th Anniversary of Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1 and DC and Marvel Present: Superman and Spider-Man Treasury Edition #1 will be released on January 7 and February 4 respectively.

In addition to Superman and Spider-Man coming together, 2025 also saw Marvel release Deadpool/Batman #1 on September 17, followed by DC’s Batman/Deadpool #1 on November 19. Both comics have received renewed print runs due to their popularity among fans and collectors.

Cover photo: David Nakayama and Jorge Jimenez/DC Comics

She takes over from Bernadine Evaristo who completed her four-year term at the meeting and called Shafak “a terrifically inspired choice”.

Evaristo recounted her successor’s achievements as “a global bestseller with a renowned reputation as a writer, intellectual and public speaker,” calling Shafak, “a longstanding advocate for literature and the power of storytelling to bridge differences and illuminate multiple perspectives.”

The incoming president said she was “very touched and humbled” and that while she has plans for her tenure as president, she wants to star by listening to “the thoughts and suggestions of my fellow writers and poets”.

In an Instagram post, she said was “deeply honoured and excited” to be taking on the charge. She said members must regard the RSL as “a much-needed sanctuary, an oasis, a space of togetherness, empathy, inspiration and creativity,” especially in an “increasingly turbulent and harsh world”.

Speaking to The Guardian, Shafak said, “For me, the word ‘fellowship’ does not only mean joining an organisation of such exceptional value and history. I also want to focus on the second meaning of the word. Fellowship, as in companionship, solidarity, togetherness. I find this very important because we live in an increasingly turbulent and harsh world where many in the arts feel very lonely.”

The author said there were “too many challenges” facing writers, librarians and others who have dedicated their lives to “the love of literature”.

Shafak, who had been serving as the society’s vice-president since 2020, is the author of 21 books — 13 of them being novels. She writes in Turkish and English and is known for works such as The Forty Rules of Love and The Bastard of Istanbul. Her work has been translated into 58 languages.

Two of her books have made the shortlist for the RSL Ondaatje prize while her 2019 book , 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Cover photo: Royal Society of Literature