Up in the glaciers of Northern Pakistan, a tragedy at a mountain lake entwines the fates of two lovers with the people they encounter there: Miryam, a nomad, travelling with her family into the mountains to escape persecution, and Irfan, haunted by ghosts and hoping that the mountains may offer him a reprieve from his troubles.
Set in the Andaman Islands over the course of oppressive imperial regimes, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a complex, gripping homage to those omitted from the collective memory. Nomi and Zee are Local Borns--their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory. When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands--and the seas surrounding them--become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals. Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan's extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent
A world-class tale of love and deceit, rivalry and destiny in a truly masterful and thoroughly involving novel from the Lahore-based writer Uzma Aslam Khan.
Dia ist die Tochter von Riffat, der erfolgreichsten Seidenfabrikantin in Karatschi. Wie ihre Mutter ist Dia emanzipiert und selbstbewußt und lebt ein Leben scheinbar frei von allen überkommenen traditionellen Bindungen. Daanish studiert in den USA. Als sein Vater stirbt und er zur Beerdigung nach Pakistan fliegt, lernt er Dia kennen. Die beiden jungen Leute verlieben sich. Doch als Riffat von der Verbindung hört, verbietet sie ihrer Tochter jeden Kontakt mit Daanish und dessen Familie. Sie, die immer von der Stimme des Herzens gesprochen hat, der man allen Widerständen zum Trotz folgen solle. Dia ist fassungslos und verzweifelt. Nach und nach kommt die Geschichte von Riffat ans Licht, eine Geschichte von der Liebe ihres Lebens, und Dia muß erkennen, daß auch die Freiheit ihre Grenzen hat. Poetisch und voller philosophischer Einsichten erzählt Uzma Aslam Khan vom Leben und Lieben der heutigen pakistanischen Jugend zwischen Politik, Tradition und Moderne – spannend, rührend, klug.