Jannat Kay Pattay / جنت کے پتے


Nemrah Ahmed - 2012
    To keep the video away from the eyes of the members of her traditional family and to avoid any complications, she had to contact an officer of the Cyber Crime Cell who could have had her video removed. But soon she was unsettled by the fact that this faceless officer already knew so much about her.Will Haya be able to get that video removed from the internet? Will she be able to go to Turkey? And more importantly, will she finally be able to meet "him", him who she has never met before but has been searching for for many years?From the streets of Istanbul to the Bosporus sea, from the caves of Cappadocia to the torture cells in Indian jails, Jannat Kay Pattay (English: Leaves of Heaven) is like a roller coaster ride in which most of your guesses will be proved wrong and this mysterious story will keep its secrets safe till the last sentence. Because keeping secrets is an art and not everyone knows it!It was first published in Shuaa Digest from March 2012 to May 2013.

Raja Gidh / راجه گدھ


Bano Qudsia - 1981
    Gidh is the Urdu word for a vulture and Raja is a Hindi synonym for king. The name anticipates the kingdom of vultures. In fact, parallel to the main plot of the novel, an allegorical story of such a kingdom is narrated. The metaphor of the vulture as an animal feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals is employed to portray the trespassing of ethical limits imposed by the society or by the religion.Bano Qudsia has written this novel drawing on the religious concept of Haraam and Halaal. Many readers tend to interpret Raja Gidh as a sermon, in which Bano Qudsia puts forth her theory of hereditary transmission of Haraam genes. Naturally the plot is woven to support the thesis. In the opinion of many readers and critics she manages to convince them that the pursuance of Haraam, be it financial, moral or emotional, results in the deterioration of a person's normality in some sense. She seems to suggest that the abnormality is transferred genetically to the next generation.Apart from the above implication the novel has many social, emotional and psychological aspects. The nostalgic narration of the historical Government College Lahore and of the Lawrence Garden Lahore lights upon the days of seventies and eighties.Bano Qudsia is among those Urdu writers who would think ten times before writing a sentence. But she does not sacrifice the flow of the narrative anywhere in this novel. Her characters are not black and white ones as some of the critics would like to suggest. Every sensitive reader who has attended a college or a university in a Pakistani setting is bound to find some similarities between themselves and one of the characters.Plot: Seemin Shah, hailing from an upper middle class family, falls in love with her handsome class fellow Aftab in the MA Sociology class at Government College Lahore. Seemin is a modern and attractive urban girl and attracts most of her male class fellows, including the narrator (abdul)Qayyum and the young liberal professor Suhail. Aftab belongs to a Kashmiri business family. Though he also loves her, he can not rise above his family values and succumbs to his parent's pressure to marry someone against his wishes and leave for London to look after his family business. Now the long story of separation begins.

Humsafar / ہمسفر


Farhat Ishtiaq - 2008
    The novel was first published in 7 parts in Khawateen Digest monthly from July 2007 to January 2008. It was later published as a complete novel by Ilm-o-Irfan Publishers. The story revolves around Ashar and Khirad's relationship with their daughter, Hareem, and how she unknowingly bridges the distances that exist between her parents. The novel is written in a retrospective manner and told mostly in flashbacks. The first half of the novel is based on mostly Ashar’s reflections and his point of view while the second part of the novel is told mainly from Khirad’s point of view.The story has been adapted into a drama serial (Humsafar), produced by Momina Duraid and directed by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat. The drama aired on Hum TV from September 2011 to February 2012.

Yaaram / يارم


Sumaira Hameed - 2014
    There she meets Aliyan, a British Muslim who is the center of everybody's attention. Both are broken souls, bearers of terrible burdens but when they meet, their fates are forever intertwined.It was first published in Shuaa Digest: July 2014-March 2015.

Qaisar o Kisra / قیصر و کسریٰ


Naseem Hijazi - 1926
    It follows Asim, a young Arab, who leaves his homeland to escape the barbarism there in search for peace and finds himself caught between a bloody war between two great powers of the world.

The Forty Rules of Love


Elif Shafak - 2009
    Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir­rors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.

If Tomorrow Comes


Sidney Sheldon - 1985
    Tracy Whitney is young, beautiful and intelligent - and about to marry into wealth and glamour. Until, suddenly, she is betrayed, framed by a ruthless Mafia gang, abandoned by the man she loves. Only her ingenuity saves her and helps her fight back.

Broken Verses


Kamila Shamsie - 2005
    Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code—a letter that could only have been written recently. Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother? Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

Mann Chalay Ka Sauda / من چلے کا سودا


Ashfaq Ahmed - 2011
    This drama will move you, inspire you, and probably even change your life.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti


Mohammed Hanif - 2010
    Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse, grade 4. It is only a few weeks since her release from Borstal. She has returned to her childhood home in the French Colony, where her father, recently retired from his position as chief janitor, continues as part-time healer, and full-time headache for the local church. It seems she has inherited some of his gift.With guidance from the working nurse’s manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings succour to the thousands of patients littering the hospital’s corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious ‘Gentleman Squad’ of the Karachi police. They fall in love; Teddy with sudden violence, Alice with cautious optimism.Their love is unexpected, but the consequences are not.Alice soon finds that her new life is built on foundations as unstable as those of her home. A Catholic snubbed by other Catholics, who are in turn hated by everyone around them, she is also put at risk by her husband, who does two things that no member of the Gentlemen Squad has ever done – fall in love with a working girl, and allow a potentially dangerous suspect to get away. Can Teddy and Alice ever live in peace? Can two people make a life together without destroying the very thing that united them? It seems unlikely, but then Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse...Filled with wit, colour and pathos, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a glorious story of second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in unlikely places, set in the febrile streets of downtown Karachi. It is the remarkable new novel from the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

The Sparrow


Mary Doria Russell - 1996
    While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question what it means to be "human".

Eleven Minutes


Paulo Coelho - 2003
    At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer. . . .” A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune.Maria’s despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness—sexual pleasure for its own sake—or risking everything to find her own “inner light” and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.

The Time Keeper


Mitch Albom - 2012
    The inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.He returns to our world - now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began - and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.

Three Comrades


Erich Maria Remarque - 1936
    On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love, and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can never have imagined. . . .Written with the same overwhelming simplicity and directness that made All Quiet on the Western Front a classic, Three Comrades portrays the greatness of the human spirit, manifested through characters who must find the inner resources to live in a world they did not make, but must endure.

A Thousand Splendid Suns


Khaled Hosseini - 2007
    It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives - the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness - are inextricable from the history playing out around them.Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love - a stunning accomplishment.--front flap