Book picks similar to
Snuffing out the Moon by Osama Siddique


fiction
pakistan
urdu-literature
historical-fiction

The Last Train


Sue Lawrence - 2018
    on 28 December 1879, a violent storm batters the newly built iron rail bridge across the River Tay, close to the city of Dundee. Ann Craig is waiting for her husband, the owner of the largest local mill, to return home. From her window Ann sees a strange and terrible sight as the bridge collapses, and the lights of the train in which he is travelling plough down into the freezing river waters.As Ann manages the grief and expectations of family and friends, amid a town mourning its loved ones, doubt is cast on whether Robert was on the train, after all. If not, where is he, and who is the mysterious woman who is first to be washed ashore? In 2015, Fiona Craig wakes to find that her partner Pete, an Australian restaurateur, has cleared the couple's bank account before abandoning his car at the local airport and disappearing. When the police discover his car is stolen, Fiona conducts her own investigation into Pete's background, slowly uncovering dark secrets and strange parallels with the events of 1879.

The Deathday Letter


Shaun David Hutchinson - 2010
    Ollie can't be bothered to care about anything but girls until he gets his Deathday Letter and learns he's going to die in twenty-four hours. Bummer. Ollie does what he does best: nothing. Then his best friend convinces him to live a little, and go after Ronnie, the girl who recently trampled his about-to-expire heart. Ollie turns to carloads of pudding and over-the-top declarations, but even playing the death card doesn't work. All he wants is to set things right with the girl of his dreams. It's now or never...

The Memory Police


Yōko Ogawa - 1994
    Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

The Fever Code


James Dashner - 2016
    Families died, violence reigned, and man killed man.Next came WICKED, who were looking for an answer. And then they found the perfect boy.The boy’s name was Thomas, and Thomas built a maze.Now there are secrets.There are lies.And there are loyalties history could never have foreseen. This is the story of that boy, Thomas, and how he built a maze that only he could tear down.All will be revealed.

Gold Diggers


Sanjena Sathian - 2021
    He just doesn't share the same drive as everyone around him. His perfect older sister is headed to Duke. His parents' expectations for him are just as high. He tries to want this version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.But Anita has a secret: she and her mother Anjali have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that harnesses the ambition of the jewelry's original owner. Anjali's own mother in Bombay didn't waste the precious potion on her daughter, favoring her sons instead. Anita, on the other hand, just needs a little boost to get into Harvard. But when Neil--who needs a whole lot more--joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart.Ten years later, Neil is an oft-stoned Berkeley history grad student studying the California gold rush. His high school cohort has migrated to Silicon Valley, where he reunites with Anita and resurrects their old habit of gold theft--only now, the stakes are higher. Anita's mother is in trouble, and only gold can save her. Anita and Neil must pull off one last heist.Gold Diggers is a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation in to questions of identity and coming of age--that tears down American shibboleths.

Small Pleasures


Clare Chambers - 2021
    But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys: Gretchen is now a friend, and her quirky and charming daughter Margaret a sort of surrogate child. And Jean doesn't mean to fall in love with Gretchen's husband, Howard, but Howard surprises her with his dry wit, his intelligence and his kindness — and when she does fall, she falls hard.But he is married, and to her friend — who is also the subject of the story she is researching for the newspaper, a story that increasingly seems to be causing dark ripples across all their lives. And yet Jean cannot bring herself to discard the chance of finally having a taste of happiness...But there will be a price to pay, and it will be unbearable.

Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous


Manu Joseph - 2017
    The rescue operation finds a single survivor in the debris. The only person able to reach him is Akhila Iyer, a medical student who is also a notorious social media prankster. She finds him mumbling in delirium that two people are on their way to carry out a terror attack. Elsewhere, a young intelligence agent, Mukundan, is assigned to shadow the two terror suspects.

Hullo Russia, Goodbye England


Derek Robinson - 2008
    and qualifies to fly the Vulcan bomber. Piloting a Vulcan is an unforgettable experience: no other aircraft comes close to matching its all-round performance. And as bombers go, it's drop-dead gorgeous.But there's a catch. The Vulcan has only one role: to make a second strike. To act in retaliation for a Russian nuclear attack. Silk knows that knows that if he ever flies his Vulcan in anger, he'll be flying from a smoking wasteland, a Britain obliterated. But in the mad world of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Vulcan is the last--the only--deterrent.Derek Robinson returns with another rip-roaring, gung-ho R.A.F. adventure, one that exposes and confronts the brinkmanship and saber-rattling of the Cold War Era.

Mail Order Bride : Savannah's Cowboy (Westward Wanted)


Crystal Anne Tilden - 2014
    This big step seems her best chance to find a husband. After all she is twenty-four and a schoolmarm on the fast track to spinsterhood. Wearing her best hat and her bravest face, she steps off the train expecting to find a respectable marriageable man waiting for her. Specifically she expects to be met by “a fine-looking bachelor rancher of twenty-six years of age in need of a cheerful, sturdy and well-mannered wife.” Instead she is met by a rangy looking cowhand who is fifty years old if he is a day. When she refuses to marry him and rebukes him for misrepresenting himself he tries to force her to go with him. A handsome cowboy strides over and confronts the lying creep who lured her out West. He is every inch her idea of the perfect cowboy, strong and handsome, confident and heroic. After he runs off the lout, she thanks him. She remembers him from the train. The moment he boarded she noticed his striking gray eyes and his charismatic way. Unfortunately since a woman and three small children were with him she took him for a married man. But he isn’t. He is looking after his widowed sister and little nephews. Good news. Savannah, resigns to wait a week for the Georgia bound train to come, but soon learns the school teacher is seriously ill and volunteers to substitute for as long as she is needed, even though it will delay her departure. As sickness spreads through town and her relationship with the cowboy becomes more complicated, it becomes unclear whether she will find love in Dovetail or return home content to be a spinster schoolmarm. Also by Crystal Anne Tilden The Best Selling Christian Western Romance, Mail Order Bride: Carrie and the Cowboy

The Willow Pool


Elizabeth Elgin - 2000
    But before Meg can take her first steps into the unknown alone, she must look to her past. Why, she wonders, did her mother wear a wedding ring but never marry? Why, for instance, does the tallyman never call at No. 3 Tippet's Yard to collect any rent? He does everywhere else. With Ma gone, Meg must go back to her roots to uncover her 'family tree'. However, the process of simplfying her life leads to unforseen complications. But there's always Kip, reliable and loving, to pick up the pieces of her unsolved life and love.

The Shadow Doctor


Adrian Plass - 2017
    Sure, you can bring him your problems - but the chances are his solutions will blow your mind. This man can see into your soul, and the cures he prescribes don't come from the pharmacy. If you have fears you just cannot face, wounds you can't even bear to remember - if you've been abused, ignored, damaged by all life throws at you - the Shadow Doctor is here to help.But the Shadow Doctor has shades of his own, and the work of helping others may be the only thing keeping him afloat. Can he stay ahead of the demons that torment him long enough to help those who need him?

Night Waking


Sarah Moss - 2011
    She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer, and a novelist of great emotional depth.

Before She Sleeps


Bina Shah - 2018
    The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible.Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

A Burning


Megha Majumdar - 2020
    PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely--an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.

The Rice Mother


Rani Manicka - 2002
    At fourteen, she finds herself traded in marriage to a stranger across the ocean in the fascinating land of Malaysia. Duped into thinking her new husband is wealthy, she instead finds herself struggling to raise a family with a man too impractical to face reality and a world that is, by turns, unyielding and amazing, brutal and beautiful. Giving birth to a child every year until she is nineteen, Lakshmi becomes a formidable matriarch, determined to wrest from the world a better life for her daughters and sons and to face every new challenge with almost mythic strength.By sheer willpower Lakshmi survives the nightmare of World War II and the Japanese occupation -- but not unscathed. The family bears deep scars on its back and in turn inflicts those wounds on the next generation. But it is not until Lakshmi's great-granddaughter, Nisha, pieces together the mosaic of her family history that the legacy of the Rice Mother bears fruit.