Though Samad attempts to persuade his mother to join them in Australia, she insists on remaining in Karachi even while Pakistan is facing turmoil. It's 1985. The mullahs and the generals are in control, and an insurgency is beginning in Kashmir. Meanwhile, Bilqis's servant girl, Mumtaz, enters a relationship with Omar, a young man caring for a neighboring house. Omar is an intense man who resents Pakistan's class system, and his frustration leads him to the freedom movement in Kashmir. But Mumtaz is in love and willing to sacrifice her honor to be with him. The intertwining stories of Bilqis, Samad, and Mumtaz offer a powerful and nuanced portrait of Pakistan in the modern era-a place of conflicting loyalties, rich with history and culture, and plagued by violence. Abidi's precise and elegant prose illuminates the struggle between a mother and son to reconcile their love for each other with their love for home.

    Before long, he can't pay his bills, and he loses his toehold among Pakistan's cell-phone-toting elite. Daru descends into drugs and dissolution, and, for good measure, he falls in love with the wife of his childhood friend and rival, Ozi—the beautiful, restless Mumtaz.Desperate to reverse his fortunes, Daru embarks on a career in crime, taking as his partner Murad Badshah, the notorious rickshaw driver, populist, and pirate. When a long-planned heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed. The uncertainty of his fate mirrors that of Pakistan itself, hyped on the prospect of becoming a nuclear player even as corruption drains its political will.Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke portrays a contemporary Pakistan as far more vivid and disturbing than the exoticized images of South Asia familiar to most of the West. This debut novel establishes Mohsin Hamid as a writer of substance and imagination.

    Ali's target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistan. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. There's only one problem: the line of would-be Zia assassins is longer than he could have possibly known.

    Beginning in Lahore, the novel enters its first phase with Mariam struggling to retain the memories of her dead grandfather so engrained within her.With willful and determined self-assurance, she leaves for America in search of better days, carrying these memories with her. But encounters with strangers in an unfamiliar land leave Mariam confused and vulnerable. In the midst of forging new paths, she learns of the disappearance of her younger brother, Abdullah, in America.A reverse journeying then begins as she travels backwards to her roots to confront what she once left behind, in order to find the answers she is looking for. Against the backdrop of unyielding social institutions threatened by change and independent individuals, Mariam vows that she will not stop looking for her brother.Ashes, Wine and Dust describes a young woman’s exploration of self-identity through the invisible ropes of social customs, stereotypes and love. As love in all forms is tested in the most strenuous of ways, disappearance in turn, becomes the less chosen road towards a self-discovery.

    The grim circumstances of Laila’s life are counter-balanced by her energy, vitality and determination to survive. Nine-year-old Laila is spirited and intelligent. She lives in a slum but she is happy: she’s got plenty of friends to play with, and is well looked after by her beloved elder sister, Jumana, while her mother works as a maid for rich families across town. But when Jumana contracts TB, their mother cannot afford the medicines that would save her life. Following Jumana’s lingering, painful death, and her mother’s emotional collapse, Laila discovers that her feckless stepfather is planning to sell her into prostitution to pay his gambling debts. Running away is her only option. Finding help from unexpected quarters, Laila makes her way to one of the families her mother worked for, and is taken into their household as a servant. There she finds unimaginable luxury, but also great unhappiness within this privileged family. At first Laila’s gift for making friends serves her well, but then disaster strikes, and Laila must flee again. But where is she running, and to whom? How can she hide from the terrible violence that threatens her? And how can she hope to find love, affection, and the chance at a normal life? Slum Child is the story of a girl forced to run alone, strong and courageous, to a future that cannot deny her happiness.

    Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school because she suffers from polio. She spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws. It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, religious intolerance, and the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition. As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her. Lenny enjoys a happy, privileged life in Lahore, but the kidnapping of her beloved Ayah signals a dramatic change. Soon Lenny’s world erupts in religious, ethnic, and racial violence. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the domestic drama serves as a microcosm for a profound political upheaval.

    Pakistan may be making headlines - but Butterfly is set to conquer the world. 'Everyone knows me. All of Lahore, all of Karachi, all of Isloo - oho, baba, Islamabad - half of Dubai, half of London and all of Khan Market and all the nice, nice bearers in Imperial Hotel also...No ball, no party, no dinner, no coffee morning, no funeral, no GT - Get-Together, baba - is complete without me.' Meet Butterfly, Pakistan's most lovable, silly, socialite. An avid party goer, inspired mis speller, and unwittingly acute observer of Pakistani high society, Butterfly is a woman like no other. In her world, SMS becomes S & M and people eat 'three tiara cakes' while shunning 'do number ka maal'. 'What cheeks!' as she would say. As her country faces tribulations - from 9/11 to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - Butterfly glides through her world, unfazed, untouched, and stopped short only by the chip in her manicure. Wicked, irreverent and hugely entertaining, "The Diary of a Social Butterfly" gives you a delicious glimpse into the parallel universe of the have-musts.

    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.

    It is a formidable world and the people who live there are constantly subjected to extremes—both of geography and of culture.The Wandering Falcon begins with a young couple, refugees from their tribe, who have traveled to the middle of nowhere to escape the cruel punishments meted upon those who transgress the boundaries of marriage and family. Their son, Tor Baz, descended from both chiefs and outlaws, becomes “The Wandering Falcon,” a character who travels throughout the tribes, over the mountains and the plains, in the towns and tents that comprise the homes of the tribal people. The media today speak about this unimaginably remote region, a geopolitical hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks, and conflict—now, told in the rich, dramatic tones of a master storyteller, this stunning, honor-bound culture is revealed from the inside.Jamil Ahmad has written an unforgettable portrait of a world of custom and compassion, of love and cruelty, of hardship and survival, a place fragile, unknown, and unforgiving.

    As a result she won The Young Journalist of the Year Award. This is a descriptive analysis of what she sees as the tragedy of Pakistan as it moves towards the 21st century - a woeful catalogue of vested interests, corruption, an overpowering military and an unconfident and enfeebled new democracy. She looks at treatment of women, urban life, patronage and government, troubled relationship with India, Afghanistan and power of tribes and drug lords, the great game of espionage on the new frontier, Benazir Bhutto and her failure to impose change and the imminent breakdown of democracy.

    When the battle-worn fighters returned with no enemy or war to fight, they turned their sights on the country that had been their creator and benefactor.From the same battlegrounds that birthed the Mujahideen, a young Kamal Khan emerges as a different breed of warrior. Discarding his wealthy family comforts, Kamal becomes a precision sniper, an invincible commando and a clandestine operative bringing intimidation, dominance and death with him to the battlefield. Ending the plague is his prime directive.Shrouded in political expediency, hampered by internal power struggles, international espionage and doublespeak that makes Washington’s spin doctors proud, Kamal’s mission is a nightmare of rampant militant fundamentalism that threatens to choke and take Pakistan hostage. For him, the fight is not just for freedom, but the survival of a nation.

    This land is also home to a three-dimensional chessboard of seemingly endless war — American drones killing the Taliban; Sunni Muslims bombing Shia Muslims; and an underground, generations-old fight for independence from the central government.Three brothers, who adopt the different ways of life from each other after their father's death, meet for breakfast. Soon after, the eldest, Aman Erum, recently returned from America, hails a taxi to the local mosque. The second, Sikandar, a doctor, goes to check in at his hospital. His troubled wife, does not join the family that morning. No one knows where Mina goes these days. And the youngest, the idealist, Hayat, leaves for town on a motorbike. Seated behind him is a beautiful, fragile girl, whose life and thoughts are overwhelmed by the war that has enveloped the place of her birth.Three hours later their day will end in devastating circumstances.The Shadow of the Crescent Moon chronicles the lives of five young people trying to live and love in a world on fire. Individuals are pushed to make terrible choices. And, as the events of this single morning unfold, one woman is at the centre of it all.

    Jeo and Mikal are foster brothers from a small town in Pakistan. Though they were inseparable as children, their adult lives have diverged: Jeo is a dedicated medical student, married a year; Mikal has been a vagabond since he was fifteen, in love with a woman he can’t have. But when Jeo decides to sneak across the border into Afghanistan—not to fight with the Taliban against the Americans, rather to help care for wounded civilians—Mikal determines to go with him, to protect him. Yet Jeo’s and Mikal’s good intentions cannot keep them out of harm’s way. As the narrative takes us from the wilds of Afghanistan to the heart of the family left behind—their blind father, haunted by the death of his wife and by the mistakes he may have made in the name of Islam and nationhood; Mikal’s beloved brother and sister-in-law; Jeo’s wife, whose increasing resolve helps keep the household running, and her superstitious mother—we see all of these lives upended by the turmoil of war. In language as lyrical as it is piercing, in scenes at once beautiful and harrowing, The Blind Man’s Garden unflinchingly describes a crucially contemporary yet timeless world in which the line between enemy and ally is indistinct, and where the desire to return home burns brightest of all.

    Tim keeps the rendezvous but there is no sign of Harry.A series of strange happenings, including a Russian shipwreck and a dying secret agent, pulls him into the murky world of international espionage and leads him to uncover the truth behind Harry's disappearance.

    In an old ruined city, emptied of most of its inhabitants, Ustad Ramzi, a famous wrestler past his prime, and Gohar Jan, a well-known courtesan whose kotha once attracted the wealthy and the eminent, contemplate the former splendour of their lives and the ruthless currents of time and history that have swept them into oblivion.