Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, seduced by the romance of the militant, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir—angrier, more violent, more hopeless—was never far away. In 2003, the young journa...

What happens when a democratically elected leader evolves into an authoritarian ruler, limiting press freedom, civil liberties, and religious and ethnic tolerance?India and Turkey are two of the world’s biggest democracies—multi-ethnic nations that rose from their imperial past to be founded on the values of modernity. They have fair elections, open markets, and freedom of religion.Yet this is an account of how the charismatic strongmen Narendra Modi, in In...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary novel of love and loss, now reissued with a new introduction by the authorPublished to astonishing acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered judge wants only to retire in peace when his orphaned grand...

An E-book to beat the bombing - Expose the Big Lie in time to stop the war. Syria's situation is truly serious, under ruthless attack by enemies within and without. The so-called Syrian uprising is actually a cynical US-engineered plot using mercenaries, wahhabi fanatics and corrupt NGO's. They are determined to smash this independent Arab socialist state where oil wealth is spent on human welfare, like Libya before it was torn apart in the same way. Neighboring nations move in for the kil...

A secular feminist army courageously challenges the Islamic StateIn war-torn northern Syria, a democratic society—based on secularism, ethnic inclusiveness, and gender equality—has won significant victories against the Islamic State, or Daesh, with women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders.A Road Unforeseen recounts the dramatic, underreported history of the Rojava Kurds, whose all-women militia was instrumental in the perilo...

Five books of essays in one volume from the Booker Prize–winner and "one of the most ambitious and divisive political essayists of her generation" ( The Washington Post).With a new introduction by Arundhati Roy, this new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living—published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things—in which she forcefully condemned India's nuclear tests and its construct...

The Arab World is a region that has been vastly misunderstood in the West. Arab Voices asks the questions, collects the answers, and shares the results that will help us see Arabs clearly. The book will bring into stark relief the myths, assumptions, and biases that hold us back from understanding this important people. Here, James Zogby debuts a brand new, comprehensive poll, bringing numbers to life so that we can base policy and perception on the real world, rather than on a co...

In this sparkling collection from one of our greatest essayists, Pankaj Mishra looks at the surprising ways modernity has come to South Asia. With lurid and astonishing characters, including, among others, heroin addicted jihadis, Indian mafia dons, Bollywood stars and Tibetan Buddhist activists, Mishra paints a picture of societies that are still struggling to define themselves.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap,a trek across a socially and politically damaged South AsiaBestselling author Steve Coll is one of the preeminent journalists of the twenty-first century. His last two books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and New York Times bestseller The Bin Ladens, have been praised for their creative insight and complex yet compelling na...

Recent military interventions gone wrongIt was an exclusive lunch at a high-end Manhattan restaurant on 7 March 2011. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his A-team were present. It soon became clear that the main item on the menu was Libya, where it was alleged that the forces of Muammar Gaddafi were advancing on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi to crush all opposition. Over an $80 per head lunch, a small group of the world's most important diplomats from countries represented on...

Who can foretell India's future? Mr. Joshi is a fortune teller in a slum in south Delhi who uses a soothsaying green parrot to make predictions. When Adam Roberts visited him in 2012, Joshi's parrot declared that India was destined to become the most powerful nation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The parrot also foretold that India would win the soccer World Cup.Parrots may not be the preeminent political authority, but many Indians were just as confident. So Adam Roberts spen...

This book tells the story of the tragic and often tormented relationship between the United States and Pakistan. Pakistan's internal troubles have already threatened US security and international peace, and Pakistan's rapidly growing population, nuclear arsenal, and relationships with China and India will continue to force it upon America's geostrategic map in new and important ways over the coming decades. This book explores the main trends in Pakistani society that will help determine it...