Season Of The Rainbirds

The first novel by the author of Maps for Lost Lovers: a powerful and exquisitely written story set in a small town in Pakistan after the murder of a corrupt and prominent local judge. When a sack of letters that were thought to have disappeared in a train crash nineteen years earlier reappears under mysterious circumstances, the inhabitants of a secluded Pakistani village wait anxiously to see what secrets may come to light. Could the letters hold any information about Judge Anwar's murder? As Aslam traces the murder investigation over the next eleven days, he explores the impact that these two events have on a variety of people in the town--from the surviving family of the judge to a journalist reporting on the delivery of the mail packet. With great attention to detail and beautiful scenes that explore the daily rhythms of life in Pakistan, Aslam creates an exotic and timeless world whose traditional rituals are played out against an ominous backdrop of faraway civil wars, assassinations, changing regimes, and religious tensions.

Through interviews with leading writers (including Ahdaf Soueif and Hanif Kureishi), this book analyzes the writing and opinions of novelists of Muslim heritage based in the UK. Discussion centres on writers' work, literary techniques, and influences, and on their views of such issues as the hijab, the war on terror and the Rushdie Affair.

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

Famous writers are often reticent about how and why they write, how their ideas and themes develop or how their characters and plots emerge. They can be equally reserved about their personal histories. But in the hands of seasoned journalist and skilful interviewer Sunil Sethi, presenter of Just Books, NDTV's long-running weekend literary show, they open up in unexpected and fascinating ways. In this selection of thirty of his best interviews from Just Books, they speak freely and frankly about their craft, their life stories and the nature of their creative impulse. Featured here are literary giants, including Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners; internationally acclaimed historians, biographers and philosophers; authors of best-selling thrillers, novels and travel books; and brilliant young trendsetters. Their conversations with Sethi are, in turn, reflective and incisive, witty and poignant, but always candid and intimate, as they provide rare insights into their inner lives and engagement with the world they inhabit. Each voice in this diverse collection is original, distinctive and revealing, as they cover the wide terrain of life and literature. This volume vividly brings alive each author's personality and work, ingeniously bridging the gap between reader and writer.

The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing forms a theoretical, comprehensive, and critically astute overview of the history and future of Pakistani literature in English. Dealing with key issues for global society today, from terrorism, religious extremism, fundamentalism, corruption, and intolerance, to matters of love, hate, loss, belongingness, and identity conflicts, this Companion brings together over thirty essays by leading and emerging scholars, and presents: the transformations and continuities in Pakistani anglophone writing since its inauguration in 1947 to today; contestations and controversies that have not only informed creative writing but also subverted certain stereotypes in favour of a dynamic representation of Pakistani Muslim experiences; a case for a Pakistani canon through a critical perspective on how different writers and their works have, at different times, both consciously and unconsciously, helped to realise and extend a uniquely Pakistani idiom. Providing a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to cross-cultural relations and to historical, regional, local, and global contexts that are essential to reading Pakistani anglophone literature, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing is key reading for researchers and academics in Pakistani anglophone literature, history, and culture. It is also relevant to other disciplines such as terror studies, post-9/11 literature, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, human rights, diaspora studies, space and mobility studies, religion, and contemporary South Asian literatures and cultures.

Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.

Love is not consolation, it is light.' From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers comes a searing, exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11 - a story of war, of one family's losses, and of the simplest, most enduring human impulses. Jeo and Mikal, foster-brothers from a small Pakistani city, secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban, but to help and care for wounded civilians. But it soon becomes apparent that good intentions can't keep them out of harm's way... From the wilds of Afghanistan to the heart of the family left behind - their blind father haunted for years by the death of his wife, by the mistakes he may have made in the name of Islam and nationhood, Jeo's steadfast wife and her superstitious mother - Aslam's prose takes us on an extraordinary journey.

Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus’s daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan—as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.