Betrayal, bereavement, exile, belonging - these are the themes that resonate throughout This Other Salt. A writer torn between two loves looks for his lost words in the gap between memory, mourning and desire; a poet revenges herself on her faithless lover by turning their romance into a legend of biblical proportions; and a teenage boy's life uncannily begins to resemble the role he plays in a school operetta ...Combining satire, legend, poetry, history and memoir, the linked stories of T...

Usman is visiting post-war London from Pakistan when he meets a young aspiring artist called Lydia who has, like him, come out of an unhappy marriage. Just as the lonely strangers' friendship begins to blossom into something deeper Usman has to return to Karachi, leaving Lydia behind. Two years later, Lydia impulsively abandons her life in London and boards a ship to Karachi, where the two are married. But as the years flit by Usman feels distanced from his life and realises that he hasn't...

A masterful new collection from a leading exponent of the short story.A poem sparks off an epistolary exploration of romance, a television series consumes a writer's curiosity, a princess sets out in search of her husband, a young boy learns of love and loss at boarding school - Aamer Hussein infuses these stories with his musical, poetic sensibility. From the experimental 'The Tree at the Limit' to the mellow, almost mythical 'The Swan's Wife', and to the rambling conversations of ...

"A thing of beauty. . . . You must read it."—Nadeem Aslam"A shower of pleasures."—Julia O'Faolain"Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and seductive, the novel engages mind and senses alike."—André Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary SupplementLike his parents, he too spent many hours sending cloud messages to other places, messages of longing for something that he knew existed otherwhere.London, that distant rainy place his father lived in once, is w...

On the shores of Lake Como a man and a woman talk about longing and belongingl; a translator finds himself drawn into the personal and political turmoil of the poet he translates; a woman's quiet world is eroded by World War II and the division of her country. Charting the geographies of leave-taking and homecoming, the consolations and rivalries of friendship, adolescent yearnings and maturity's tentative acceptance of longing, these exquisite stories engage with the grand narratives of o...

Pakistan's finest women writers – Jamila Hasmi, Mumtaz Shirin and Fahmida Riaz among others – introduce us to the compelling cadences of rich literary culture. A naive peasant is left with a white man's baby; a frustrated housewife slashes her husband's silk pyjamas; a middle-class housewife sees visions of salvation in the tricks of circus animals… Equally at ease with polemic and lyricism, these writers mirror the events of their convoluted history – nationalism and independence, wars wi...

The accidental discovery of chapters from an unfinished novel and of unpublished stories, made the publication of this anthology of Attia Hosain’s new and selected fiction an inevitability.Attia’s two worlds the Lucknow she grew up in and the London she later lived and worked in intersect and mesh in the stories and novel excerpts presented here, reflecting her deep and abiding concern with those caught in the cleft stick of history, and how they come to terms with it.The distinctive quali...

This dazzling anthology features the work of seventy-nine outstanding writers from all over the Arab-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south.Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies, called by Edward Said “the leading Arabic-to-English translator of our time,” this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in we...

The Indian short story is extraordinary in its ability to stick to the traditional rules of the craft and still demonstrate remarkable originality. It revolves around a limited number of characters, confines itself in time and space, and has a well-plotted narrative that drives its central theme. Within the traditional framework, however, creativity flowers and a fresh and imaginative story emerges. This volume is chock-full with such stories, written by authors well known in their regiona...

All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth century were no exception: for them, there were lies, damned lies, and Ibn Battutah's India.Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. Here Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan's journey - the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of his Indian career a...

This book-length poem is set at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 when thousands of people were killed in civil unrest and millions displaced, with families later split between the two countries. Inspired by family history, Moniza Alvi weaves a deeply personal story of fortitude and courage, as well as of tragic loss, in this powerful work in 20 parts. At the Time of Partition is Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection Eur...

**National Book Award FinalistWinner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction AwardWinner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation AwardWinner of the Anisfield-Wolf AwardWinner of the Bard Fiction PrizeOne of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the YearOne of Granta’s Best Young American NovelistsA Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearPEN Cente...