Jul 21, 2025
In September 2012, over 250 workers perished in a fire at Ali Enterprises, a garment factory in Karachi working for a German retailer. Was this arson or an accident? Laurent Gayer’s ‘Gunpoint Capitalism: Enforcing Industrial Order in Karachi’ takes this tragedy to take a probing look at a culture of industrial order through force in Karachi.
Jul 18, 2025
Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (translated by Asa Yoneda, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025) captured the public imagination with its post-apocalyptic narrative of a future depicting humanity’s precarious survival. But is this yet another in a long line of hyped spec-fic works translated from the Japanese, or does it offer greater insight into the genre?
Jul 02, 2025
‘What is and was Lahore? How has it changed in its thirteen disruptions?’ These are among the many questions that flaneur-historian Dr Manan Ahmed Asif explores in his book ‘Disrupted City’.
Jun 14, 2025
Satire aims to provoke, but does Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel go far enough?
May 12, 2025
𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘓𝘢𝘮𝘱, the first ever book translated from Kannada shortlisted by the International Booker Prize, is a collection of short stories not bothered with defining and diagnosing the problems of the nation at large, but with the minutiae, with domestic squabbles, with very peculiar anxieties
May 12, 2025
The UK-based Pakistani author’s most recent novel A Woman on a Suitcase revisits marriage and the end of it
May 12, 2025
In our increasingly media-saturated landscape, in thrall of an attention economy that strategizes attracting eyeballs and maximizing clicks per second, A Flat Place reveres and reaffirms the power of quiet observation.
Apr 21, 2025
Nobel Prize Winner Han Kang’s oeuvre may be be celebrated due to her status as a novelist “for the times”, but what separates her work from the rest is her filial devotion to other humans, especially women
Mar 05, 2025
A book that purports to fact-check the oeuvre and credibility of two Indian writers may very well be in need of fact-checking itself
Mar 01, 2025
Sarwari lays it all bare in this clear-eyed memoir about the trials of her marriage, within which the lines between mother, partner, caregiver devolved into a messy blur
Jan 27, 2025
Abu Toha, who has emerged as a significant voice during the genocide of his people, has written a harrowing testament to the interminable slaughter of Palestinians, and yet his poetry is also a fervent reclamation of Palestinian life
Jan 14, 2025
Orbital, the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, invites us to explore our fragility as human beings and bear witness to the wondrous planet we call home.
Jan 13, 2025
Imtiaz and Masood-Khan have not only painstakingly recreated the Mustafa Zaidi murder case in their book Society Girl, but also the social milieu of Karachi and Lahore in the 70s
Jan 12, 2025
The intricately plotted novel departs from the usual preoccupations and motifs of a Partition novel, and offers the reader something new
Jan 11, 2025
The book is a love letter to ancient Indian civilisations, but fails to consider its India’s current Saffron-saturated context
Jan 10, 2025
Book Review: Other Names For Love By Taymour Soomro