POETRY & PROSE

When ten-year-old Ferzana Mahmud and her three older siblings lose their mother to cancer, everything changes. Their heartbroken father moves them from their familiar Chicago suburb to a city thousands of miles away in his native Pakistan. To help them adjust to life in Karachi and to the eccentricities of their extended clan, Ferzana, Fatima, Raza, and Jamila escape into a fantasy world of their own making. As superhuman creatures with incredible powers, they investigate the members of their grandfather s household. In the process, they discover astonishing facts not only about the Mahmuds but also about the nature of family, love, and loss in the troubled yet beguiling city that is now their home. 

This volume brings together some of the best English-language verse being produced in Pakistan today from a variety of well-known and lesser-known poets.

Nineteen years after his father's murder, Haroon Rizwan returns to the country of his birth to revisit his family home. Haunted alternately by nightmare visions of his father's death and the frustrating inability to remember exactly what happened, Haroon decides to search deeper within himself for answers. The visions take him back to that fateful year, 1983, and to Abdul, the Rizwans' servant boy. As Haroon relives his childhood one troubled by his father's abusive behaviour towards his mother he comes to realize that Abdul's past, with its undertones of violence, counterpoints his own.