But Ruttie was just sixteen and her outraged father forbade the match. But when Ruttie turned eighteen, they married and Bombay society, its riches and sophistication notwithstanding, was scandalized. Everyone sided with the Petits and Ruttie and Jinnah were ostracized. It was an unlikely union that few thought would last. But Jinnah, in his undemonstrative, reserved way was unmistakably devoted to his beautiful, wayward child-bride—as proud of her fashionable dressing as he was of her intelligence, her wide reading and her fierce commitment to the nationalist struggle. Ruttie, on her part, worshipped him and could tease and cajole the famously unbending Jinnah, whom so many people found intimidating and distant. But as the tumultuous political events increasingly absorbed him, Ruttie felt isolated and alone, cut off from her family, friends and community. The unremitting effort of submitting her personality to Jinnah’s, his frequent coldness, his preoccupation with politics and the law, took its toll. Ruttie died at twenty-nine, leaving her daughter, Dina and her inconsolable husband, who never married again. Sheela Reddy, well-known journalist and former books editor of Outlook magazine, uses never-before-seen personal letters of Ruttie and her close friends as well as accounts left by contemporaries and friends to portray this marriage that convulsed Indian society, with a sympathetic, discerning eye. A product of intensive and meticulous research in Delhi, Bombay and Karachi and based on first-person accounts and sources, Reddy brings the solitary, misunderstood Jinnah and the lonely, wistful Ruttie to life. A must-read for all those interested in politics, history and the power of an unforgettable love story.

    Her husband, Massud--a fellow architect--is caught in the cross fire and dies before she can confess her greatest secret to him. Now under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, who demands that she pardon her husband's American killer, Nargis fears that the truth about her past will soon be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people's secrets from the minaret of the local mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. When the loudspeakers reveal a forbidden romance between a Muslim cleric's daughter and Nargis's Christian neighbor, Nargis finds herself trapped in the center of the chaos tearing their community apart.

    In 2011, following an attack on his offices by the Pakistani Taliban, he took a five-year sabbatical to write books and worked as a political risk consultant. He has been widely quoted and regularly featured in major news outlets like The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Le Monde, DW, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, BBC and NPR. His first novel, The Prisoner (2013), was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 and is now being adapted for a feature film. His second novel is The Spinner’s Tale (2015). In 2016, Omar returned to active duty as a Counter Terrorism Officer.

    “Whisperings of the Devil” takes us into the mind of a mistreated maidservant’s boy who gets seduced into the role of a suicide bomber. In “To Allah We Pray,” two privileged and educated young men, one of them home from Toronto, gallivant through the streets of Karachi, finally walking into a doomed mosque. “Things She Could Never Have” is a love story about two young trans women living in Karachi. “Born on the First of July” opens the door into the home of a Toronto girl who has left to join ISIS and the devastated family she leaves behind. “The First” will astonish many readers by its depiction of sexual encounters of young college girls in Pakistan. These and other stories link us into the complexities of a sometimes troubled and often misrepresented Muslim society.

    Snuffing Out the Moon is a dazzling debut novel that is at once a cry for freedom and a call for resistance.Advance Praise for Snuffing Out the Moon ‘Criss-crossing historical periods and populating its multiple narratives with a diverse set of characters, Snuffing Out the Moon is a daringly original novel charting the past and the future of our civilization, and so illuminating the author’s view of our present. A challenging and thought-provoking read’—Shashi Tharoor, author and MP‘This novel stirred strange feelings in me. Its air is bleak and somehow forbidding. It is vast in scope but comparatively compressed in a space that the novelist uses expertly to draw for us the lineages of the past, the present and the future. It leaves us with the chilling vision that evil—greed or the impulse to destroy—is man’s destiny. Masterfully composed, the novel sums up aeons of history and culture with an assurance of narrative power that makes the picture of the past and the present as compelling as his imaginings of the future. Present fears are no less than the horrible imaginings, the novel seems to say. Learned and sagacious, the narrative pleases while it also awes the reader’—Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, author of The Mirror of Beauty‘Osama Siddique’s ambitious historical novel will be of consequence not only to Pakistan but to the Indian subcontinent’—Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Ice-Candy-Man‘Innovative, introspective and evocative, this remarkable debut novel gives poignant expression to an age-old human dilemma and one of the central challenges of our own troubled times: the choice between stultifying social conformity born of ignorance, intellectual laziness and fear, and the liberating agency that comes from doubt, dissent and defiance. Polyphonic in scope and written in the fragmentary and episodic mode, the intriguingly titled Snuffing Out the Moon deftly weaves together half a dozen different narratives informed by the rich sociopolitical, cultural and literary traditions of South Asia’s six millennia- long history. Beginning in 2084 BCE with the Indus Valley Civilization and ending in 2084 CE when the deadly politics of religious radicalism and water wars have drastically recast the face of South Asia, the novel is a gripping read. It dispenses with linear time by criss-crossing the past, present and the future in a disconnected fashion without becoming random and trivial or devoid of inner meaning and connectedness. A welcome addition to South Asia’s burgeoning trove of English-language literature, it will engage and absorb a cross-section of readers with its sparkling wit, lyrical bursts and welter of insights into human frailties and foibles’—Ayesha Jalal, historian and author of Jinnah: The Sole Spokesman

    Their heartbroken father moves them from their familiar Chicago neighborhood to a city thousands of miles away in his native Pakistan. To help them adjust to life in Karachi and the eccentricities of their extended clan, Ferzana, Fatima, Raza and Jamila escape into a fantasy world of their own making. As superhuman creatures with incredible powers, they investigate the members of their grandfather's household. In the process, they discover astonishing facts not only about the Mahmuds but also about the nature of family, love and loss in the troubled yet beguiling city that is now their home. Told from the perspective of an adult Ferzana reflecting on that fateful year, we see Karachi through the impressionable eyes of a child as she negotiates everything from religious schism and genealogy to patriotism and puberty. Fresno's love of sleuthing helps her to piece together her family's complicated history - a history that brings with it the promise of hope and redemption.

    With the world’s 13th most powerful military, the 6th largest nuclear arsenal, a population of 207 million, high illiteracy, grinding poverty, and burgeoning support for Islamic fundamentalism, it is a nuclear-charged powder keg waiting to explode.Terrorist groups vie for supremacy, trying to create conditions to topple the corrupt and fractured administration.An Australian engineer, Jane Kelly, has completed installing solar panels to electrify a remote village in Central Punjab. She unwittingly runs afoul of a powerful and ruthless feudal landowner. He uses an emerging terrorist group to frame her for blasphemy, an offence with a mandatory death penalty.Not satisfied with Jane’s incarceration and almost certain execution, her enemies plot to kill her family and her.Jane’s only hope lies with her two loves, Sergei and Razane, but Razane is fighting the demons from her troubled past as a Peshmerga fighter. With the feared Pakistani Intelligence breathing down their necks, they’re running out of time, options, and hope. This unpredictable, fast-paced thriller and erotically charged love story will have you on the edge of your seat and reading late into the night.

    Events, anecdotes and personalities drive its narrative to illustrate the cocktail of hostility, nationalism and nostalgia that defines every facet of the relationship. It looks at the main events through the eyes and words of actual players and contemporary observers to illustrates how, both in India and in Pakistan, these past events are seen through radically different prisms, how history keeps resurfacing and has a resonance that cannot be avoided to this day. Apart from political, military and security issues, The People Next Door evokes other perspectives: divided families, peacemakers, war mongers, contrarian thinkers, intellectual and cultural associations, unwavering friendships, the footprint of Bollywood, cricket and literature: all of which are intrinsic parts of this most tangled of relationships.

    Shedding all the certainties of an adult she steps into a child's shoes, looks upon the world with an unjaundiced eye, and presents us with scrapes, situations and sentiments that are refreshing in their candour.As she says to three Innocents in her title story, "The pranks you engage in today are no different from the ones we played yesterday... So what advice can I give you? Actually, I look upon you as very interesting advice meant for me!"This is Chughtai at her disarming best!

    The first of its kind, this book interrogates that simplistic yet powerful geopolitical narrative and asks what truly drives India's Afghanistan policy.Based on an extensive repertoire of hitherto untapped primary sources including official memoranda, diplomatic correspondence, and a series of interviews with key political actors, My Enemy's Enemy provides a comprehensive analysis of India's strategy debates and foreign policymaking processes vis-a-vis Afghanistan, from the last decade of the Cold War to the 1990s Afghan civil war and the more recent US-led war on terror. It demonstrates that Indian presence in Afghanistan has been guided primarily by an enduring vision for the region that requires a stable balance of power across the Durand Line."

    This work highlights the elements that went into the formulation of Pakistan's nuclear policy.The book's great significance lies in the fact that it tackles the little known subject of nuclear learning most comprehensively in all its dimensions. With great clarity and balance, the author clearly highlights the discernible aspects of Pakistan's learning experience and establishes beyond doubtthat Pakistan has learnt from crises events and has evolved into a responsible nuclear weapons state with effective command, control, and custodial arrangements in place.

    In The Pakistan Anti-Hero, Paracha further explores the political and social evolution of Pakistan’s polity which he first investigated in his best-selling debut, End of the Past.He expands this investigation by closely tracking the country’s social and political trajectory through the lives of ‘anti-heroes’ – or those men and women whose place in history has transcended model heroic characteristics.From digging deeper into the psyches and histories of well-known men and women, to looking closer at the lives of those who have only briefly been explored, Paracha surveys the lives of scholars, ideologues, sportsmen, authors, politicians, militants, actors and even some obscure personalities that he met as a young man and then as a journalist.He cuts through the mainstream historical accounts of certain famous as well as notorious figures to study them in a more detached and yet empathetic manner to gain a starker understanding of a nation which has continued to develop through multiple existential crisis.

    It had transformed itself from a poverty-ridden, malnourished, corrupt and aid dependent country in 2015 to qualifying for High Income category by the World Bank and the top decile in both the Competitiveness index and Social Progress Index by 2050. Where once travel advisories warned people from visiting, it is now key destination for foreign investors, students, research and even tourism. Once a basket case seeking aid, now it has a large sovereign wealth fund. Once homeland of hordes on unemployed youth and an exporter of cheap labor today Pakistan is a center of higher learning, research and the 7th largest patent recipient in the world.How did this transformation take place? Was it good policy or good luck? Was this process driven by external aid or domestic pressures What can we learn from this experience?Eminent economist Nadeem Ul Haque creates a fictitious narrative in this book to comment on the practice of public policy in Pakistan and how it can shape future change.

    The book singles out thirteen innovativewriters for a detailed chapter on each, beginning with those who became Pakistanis after Partition (such as Shahid Suhrawardy and Ahmed Ali) but who had published major works prior to Independence. Due acknowledgement is also given to the two forgotten writers of that era: Atiya and Samuel FyzeeRahamin. Pioneering contemporary authors, from Zulfikar Ghose and Taufiq Rafat to Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri, and Hanif Kureishi are discussed in detail.The book encompasses poetry, fiction, drama, and life-writing. It includes and unites a wide range of English language writers in Pakistan with those living in the diaspora. Poets Alamgir Hashmi, Imtiaz Dharker, and Moniza Alvi; novelists Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, and Uzma Aslam Khan; shortstory writers Aamer Hussein, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Jamil Ahmed; playwrights Sayeed Ahmad, Rukhsana Ahmed, and Ayub Khan-Din are all discussed here. These are underpinned by an extensive discussion on essays, letter writing, and memoirs, including the letters of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Aly Faiz; essaysof Anwer Mooraj, Moni Mohsin, and Eqbal Ahmed; travelogues of Salman Rashid; and memoirs of Firoz Khan Noon, Tehmina Durrani, Kamran Nazeer, and others. The book also brings new perspectives and critical writings on the diverse socio-political reasons for the emergence of a Pakistani nationalliterature in English.