Linked stories draw a powerful portrait of young Pakistan, at home and in the world A group of teenagers in a Karachi high school put on a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible-and one goes missing. The incident sets off ripples through their already fraught education in lust and witches, and over the years, the young men and women grow up together and apart, haunted by both home and djinns in these lyrical linked stories. In the world of Sarvat Hasin’s contemporary seekers, young rakes move between Murree and New York and women own the magic of their inexplicable passions; a failed soap opera star forms a poignant truce of a marriage with an unlikely man who has his own scars; churails are a persistent spectre in the most modern of lives. Here is the real Pakistan of Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie, one generation younger-and a young storyteller to take on the legacy of Pakistan’s chroniclers.
Author
Sarvat Hasin is from Pakistan. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book You Can’t Go Home Again was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India’s and The Hindu’s end of year lists. She won the Moth Writer’s Retreat Bursary in 2018 and the Mo Siewcharran Prize in 2019. Her essays and poetry have appeared in publications such as Outsiders, The Mays Anthology, English PEN, and Harper’s Bazaar. She lives in London and works at the Almeida Theatre. Her new novel, The Giant Dark, is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is forthcoming from Dialogue Books on the 8th of July
