Pakistani Authors
Discover the best Pakistani authors and their iconic books, from Kamila Shamsie's *Burnt Shadows* to Mohsin Hamid's *Moth Smoke*. Explore powerful fiction by Nadeem Aslam and Bapsi Sidhwa in this curated literary guide.
Book
Cracking India
by Bapsi Sidhwa
During the 1947 Partition of India, young Lenny Sethi suffers from polio and spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, who exposes her to the differences among the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, but when Ayah is kidnapped, Lenny's world erupts into religious, ethnic, and radical violence. Reprint.
Book
Burnt Shadows
by Kamila Shamsie
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award An Orange Prize Finalist Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white. In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events. Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" (Salman Rushdie).
Book
Moth Smoke
by Mohsin Hamid
Tells the story of Darashikoh Shezad, a banker in Lahore, Pakistan, who loses his job, falls in love with his best friend's wife, and plunges into a life of drugs and crime.
Book
Maps for Lost Lovers
by Nadeem Aslam
WINNER OF THE KIRIYAMA PRIZE • If Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez had chosen to write about Pakistani immigrants in England, he might have produced a novel as beautiful and devastating as Maps for Lost Lovers. Jugnu and Chanda have disappeared. Like thousands of people all over England, they were lovers and living together out of wedlock. To Chanda’s family, however, the disgrace was unforgivable. Perhaps enough so as to warrant murder. As he explores the disappearance and its aftermath through the eyes of Jugnu’s worldly older brother, Shamas, and his devout wife, Kaukab, Nadeem Aslam creates a closely observed and affecting portrait of people whose traditions threaten to bury them alive. The result is a tour de force, intimate, affecting, tragic and suspenseful.
