Echoes From Punjab is not only a novel, but ...
345790
Echoes From Punjab is not only a novel, but also a lesson in history and spirituality. Daljit Ranajee has treated the emotions and psychology of each character in a very sensitive manner. A must read for Indians to relive their own echoes and for Americans to understand the Indian culture, moral values and conflict of Eastern and Western cultures
4764049
There always were many novels and stories from Indian authors, but Pakistani fiction started to surface only a while ago. One of the authors filling this void is Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose short stories are collected in the volume "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders". Two of the stories (the one which gave the title to the collection - the title so obviously related to Truman Capote - and the opening one, "Nawabdin Electrician") appeared in "The New Yorker" and may be known to many readers.
The stories revolve around the family estate of Mr. K. K. Harouni, a wealthy landowner and investor living near Lahore in Pakistan. The protagonists are people who are connected to the Houranis by working for them, either as servants or as professionals. They fight for their own sustenance, their families or a better life (money is a very important factor here). The lives of servants seem to be strikingly similar to those in India, described by Aravind Adiga in "The White Tiger"...
Mueenuddin writes about his subjects with tenderness and sympathy, but his sharp eye uncovers all their shortcomings and exposes the flaws of the Pakistani society. However, the stories are honest and objective, left without comments from the author/narrator, the conclusions are the reader's alone. Harouni, the master, runs his affairs with care and cares for his people - but he does it because it suits him and his family.
I liked the subtle, but accurate character development and psychological nuances, built, interestingly, mostly by showing the actions and background of the protagonists, not by the inner monologues or showing their thoughts.
I hope to get a full-length novel from Mueenuddin, I have high hopes for it after reading this collection, which is a great debut.
1169891
This is probably the finest book I have read. "Cuckold" by Kiran Nagarkar is a fabulous blend of history and fiction. Set in India in the 16 th Century on the eve of the Mughal dynasty, it is a sweeping novel that paints across the broad canvas that is India. Governance, statesmanship, intrigues, religion, arts, music, guerilla warfare, romance, mysticism - nothing seems to have been left out of this epic novel.  'Cuckold' in this novel is Maharaja Bhojraj, the eldest son of Maharana Sangha , the ruler of Mewar in what is now Rajasthan. Married to a Rajput princess who is a devotee of Lord Krishna and later turns into a saint, Bhojraj is torn by jealousy; for he sees Krishna as a competitor to his wife's affections. Governance and warfare tear him away from his wife who he at once loves and hates with blinding passion. History has little to say about the book's protagonist, but Nagarkar with consummate artistry infuses him with intelligence, sensitivity and ingenuity,and in progressive thought, a man far ahead of his times.  The 'Saint'in question is actually Mirabai, whose devotional songs pervade all of Indian cultural and religious fabric. Nagarkar's women characters are especially well wrought and gain a life and immediacy of their own, that the distance of history and geography cannot dispell. So here is a chunk of history, but such as is not available in history books.
3027251
In this early book Bharati Mukherjee and her writer husband, Clark Blaise, recount their individual stories of the aftermath of a personal tragedy that leads them to the safe harbor of Mukherjee's family home in Calcutta.

The complexities of adjustment and readjustment to life in Calcutta where one is never alone, and their individual adaptations to the social and cultural norms of an extended Bengali family, are neatly laid out side by side by this husband and wife team.

Clark's story is like looking through binoculars trying to identify something far away. He shares his initial wonder and confusion at what he sees, hears, smells and experiences with the reader and as with the clarity that comes from twisting the knobs on binoculars, India comes slowly and clearly into focus.

Bharati's tale is more like looking through a microscope at Indian culture. As she steps back into her Indian past after fourteen years in the United States and Canada, she compares and contrasts her shifting cultural expectations in a fascinating, almost analytical way.

Although their stories rarely converge in this book, we see how their year in India changes them and eventually draws them closer together.

The book is a fine memoir that will strike responsive notes in readers of Mukherjee's novels.

Kim Burdick
Stanton, Delaware
3884283
Some novels are meant to be read slowly, not only to enjoy the story but to savor it, and understand it, as if to read too quickly will mean the loss of something vital. Anthony Doerrs All the Light We Cannot See was a book like that. So is Zia Haider Rahmans In The Light of What We Know. Other than two things  the use of the word light in the titles and both being published in 2014  the two books are vastly different. But they are both great stories, wonderful stories.

In the Light of What We Know may defy a one-sentence description of what its about. It is the story of a man in his 30s named Zafar, born in Bangladesh and whose family settles in London. The story is told by his (never named in the story) friend of the same age, who comes from a distinguished Pakistani family and who was raised by his academic parents in settings like Princeton and Oxford. The two friends attended Oxford at the same time, and their friendship extends across their professional careers in finance/law (Zafar) and finance (the narrator).

The story extends across time  the creation of Bangladesh, Sept. 11, the financial meltdown of 2008, the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S.-led forces, the growth of financial markets in the 1990s. It extends cross their personal lives  their relationships with their parents, the narrators failing marriage, Britains class structure, and Zafars long running relationship with a young British woman from well beyond his own class. It also extends across their identities  who they are, where they come from, the displacement felt by expats in a foreign culture. And it extends into academics, and specifically the realm of mathematics and the sciences.

A significant thing about the novel is how Rahman wraps all of these story extensions together, so closely interweaving them that the personal becomes the geopolitical becomes the historical and the cultural. I read the story as closely as I did because I wanted to miss nothing. And I read it with the understanding that my eyes are Western, and everything seen by the West is seen through the West.

This interweaving of the story lines is also about identity, and what kind of personal identity we can have in the kind of world we live in. The fact that the narrator remains unnamed, and that we only know Zafar by that one name alone, keeps raising this question of identity. Underscoring this is how Zafar is the child of a rape by a Pakistani soldier during the war for independence in Bangladesh, hes not raised by his mother, he moves to a foreign culture (Britain), and by sheer merit alone rises from a lower-class immigrant upbringing into the British educational stratosphere. After a stint on Wall Street, he goes to Harvard law school.

What happens in Afghanistan will turn out to be pivotal, not only for the overall movement of the story but for Zafars personal life as well. It may be difficult for any Westerner to read how this part of the story develops, but it is full of surprises and shows us a part of who we are.

Some of the story of Zafar is drawn from Rahmans own life. Rahman was born in rural Bangladesh, raised in Britain, and educated in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Hes worked as an investment banker (and thus in the book we get an explanation of the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008) and as both a corporate and human rights attorney. This novel is  Rahmans first, and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britains oldest literary award.

In the Light of What We Know is a sobering story, a marvelous story, a story that makes one confront who he or she is and how we incompletely understand our world.
4450526
The silencing of women's voices is what struck me most under Taliban rule, the marginalizing of women who suffered in silence and powerlessness and lingered in stifling inequality. But, in this great read that is more than a travel book, "Listening to Pakistan" by Denise Dailey, I heard the lively infusion of a multitude of very real Pakistanis, the certainty of many voices rising up out of that silence, most notably the women's, however difficult it has been for them to be heard. And the one true voice of an author who listened to them with an open heart and mind and who carried this world back to us.
Who is that "woman's voice in a veiled land?", Dailey asks.
 This book recognizes the complexity of many Pakistan voices:  the loud ones of the silenced women; the voices of a remarkably courageous women, Asma Jahangir, who has spoken for human rights, equality in the laws and championed children's rights; those like Ghulam Sughra who created funds for rural development to advance education, health and human rights; artists who made documentary films like Nausheen Dadahboy, music like Ayman Udas and art like Lal Rukh all taking great risk.  These voices are shared with hope for change in women's status in Pakistan in the clear and compassionate tone of the author.
I felt as if I travelled in this book to another land, and felt a sisterhood connection with these women striving to lift one another up. There is a strong sense here that we are all the same, women from every culture around the world.
Inspiring read! Wonderful debut book. Where will Dailey visit next? I'd love to follow any of her travels.
773999
While not reaching the heights of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, this is a lovely story of love and loss, misplacement and desire for acceptance. Lahiri writes in a flowing and terse prose taking us across continents and decades in India and the US. As in her other books Indian immigrants struggle to adopt an American lifestyle while missing their beautiful and complicated country, but here this story delves much deeper into Indian history detailing the turmoil of the 60's and the rise of the Communist guerrilla, the Naxalites. The lives of two inseparable brothers are shaken by the desire to address the injustice in one's country and to find a better life away from it. A wonderful and engaging read about something I knew nothing about and that is still a reality in India.
902998
In this extraordinary novel, we are transported to Afghanistan through the lives of two women unfold, one born of current days, the other at the turn of the 20th century, bound together by blood and hope. From a family of five daughters in rural Afghanistan, Rahima, at nine, is allowed to take on the guise of a bacha posh, a girl dressed as a boy, able to attend school and go out in public. Shamed by his inability to produce sons, Rahimas father tolerates this situation, frequently absent fighting the Taliban with his warlord, Abdul Khaliq, growing increasingly more addicted to his medicine, opium. A few years later, in a rage, Rahima and her two eldest sisters are offered in marriage to Abdul Khaliq and his two cousins, Rahima to wed the warlord. Throughout their troubled childhoods, with an addicted father and a fearful mother, the girls find solace though the stories of their great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, as related by their maternal aunt, Khala Shaima.

Never married because of the deformity of her bent spine, Khala Shaima relates the courageous actions of Shekiba, born at the turn of the 20th century in a rural village, working the family farm with her father. When her family is decimated by a cholera epidemic, Shekiba helps her father until his death, later forced to join the extended family compound, her sheltered life at an end. The unfortunate Shekiba, half of whose face is disfigured by a burn in childhood, is exposed to the jeers of her relatives, little more than a beast of burden, bitterly recalling her mothers words: Your name means gift, my daughter. You are a gift from Allah. She also understands that gifts are given away as easily as they are accepted, a reality both for Shekiba and Rahima years later, each the pawn of family and society.

In alternating chapters, the two lives unfold, Shekiba, the scarred woman who eventually becomes a guard at the kings palace in Kabul, where she dresses as a man with other guards to protect the harem from male intruders; and the fourth wife of a warlord, of little value save an ability to read and write that allows her finally to travel to Kabul. Their parallel existences are stunningly similar, every move ordained only by the sanction of a male figure, shuffled from place to place with no regard for their feelings, each struggling to find hope in the face of grief, fear and despair. Hashimi describes the most intimate details of these womens lives, their struggles, small joys, losses and courage, each bound by tradition, each frequently in great peril, mindful of her own destiny. Their beauty shines brighter than the pain they endure, their hope an inspiration, reaching from one generation to another, their cries echoing through the years: Times change. Everything changes. Birds fly away, one by one. Luan Gaines/2014.
1683841
In his book The Seven Steps, Sudarshan Chatterjee has skillfuly woven a love story into the rich fabric of the American Indian experience. With its many intriguing subplots and enigmatic yet humane charcters, here is one book you cannot put down till the last page. As an engineer used to reading only technical material this came as a refreshing piece of fiction, which I would highly recommend for it not only tells a story, it tells a very human story very well,a story that we all can indentify with- a story of love.
2606472
This book not only has beautiful prose and well-developed characters, but also a beauty and grace that many novels lack.  The Indian landscape comes to life with Roy's descriptive prose, but what I found most impressive were the personal relationships within the book.  The family, with all its complexities and quirks, really gets to the heart of what it means to love, and lose in this life.  Most impressive are the passages written through the eyes of a child, not one detail is missed.  This book transports you to a different place, where you can almost hear, smell, and see the sights of India.
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Alice Walker, in her endorsement, calls this a "compelling and passionate novel, and anything Walker praises deserves attention.  I find it a beautifully crafted book, covering a remarkable amount of factual and emotional mileage in its brief 137 pages.  Though cast three decades ago in the shadow of the long revolution (la violencia) in Colombia, South America, it is not a political novel and the story is never unduly dark.

Its a book full of surprises, with a breathless quality, as if pouring itself out.  Theres no settling back here for the reader into predictable fiction.  Laura, a US citizen with a small daughter, visiting the homeland of her husband for the first time, flounders to find his identity, and her own, in the strange remains of his familya haughty mother, a lost father, a bedridden aunt, and a half-mad sister.

This house of once wealthy people, now a city hotel with a noisy men-only bar on the first floor, is the host and heart of the story.  Add to that visits around the spectacular country, to its famous touristy places.  (Thats what you are, a tourist, Lauras husband reminds her, assuming she cant be anything else.)  And not far away are the mountains and the indigenous population, the Indians, out of sight but woven mythically throughout the book, reminders that they are always there. They, along with the constant uncertainty and fear in the country, are a deep part of the story and Lauras struggle to understand what is going on in her own life and marriage.

In the end she does understand, or begins to, not in a cheap or easy resolution, but a private revolution, as the characters name it, a peaceful one that, as it turns out, could be viewed as symbolic of what is actually happening in Colombias peace process todayright now, so many turbulent years beyond the events of this story.

Shirley Nelson
Co-author of The Risk of Returning
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A Thousand Splendid Suns (Book Review)
TLDR : A deep dive into the Afghan society with a human touch 4/5
Book Review :
I read a lot during my office commute and I was looking for some acclaimed books to read when I made up my mind to read "A Thousand Splendid Suns". The novel leaves me with mixed feelings : more sorrow than happiness. The novel covers the stories of two main Muslim Aghan women ( a rarity and unique arc) : Mariam and Laila. Mariam is an illegitimate child who gets married off at an early age to Rasheed and Laila a precocious girl who loses her father and ends up by fate as Rasheeds second wife. The women develop a bond which is the crux of this story along with Lailas love life. This is set against the backdrop of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the infighting post the Soviets leaving, the Taliban (and radicalization), the refugee crisis, a drought and at last the US war on Afghanistan in post 9/11 world. We often see Afghanistan nowadays from the eyes of the West and its media. This gives you an insider perspective as to how these events touch the daily life of Afghan people.
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Although, at times the pain became unbelievable while reading this novel at the despair and I wanted to put it down to read something cheerful I am glad I persisted because the author ends on a happy note (at least for Laila).
One day, I plan to visit Afghanistan and visit Herat and Kabul for myself slightly more wiser and perceptive for the book.
2213949
An excellently written, moving story that allowed me see some of what living in Lahore might be like.
1842080
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, particularly because I know the language and the traditions of the place  and  could therefore immerse myself in the story.  For an Indian-American the story is particularly appealing since it is based on an area and traditions with which one is closely familiar.  An excellent narration of the compulsions of a tradition-ridden society. The interplay between the  the members of a family in an urban environment of Hyderabad which is yet to emerge into routine acceptance of  relationships in which both caste and ethnicity and ultimately colour of the skin makes good reading.  A well written story by one obviously familiar with inter-national and inter-racial complexity plus Indian caste traditions makes excellent reading.  Personally, I am familiar with the geography and social characteristics of the places described by the author.  Makes  excellent and engrossing reading.
3255114
Good books not only transport us to different lives and different locations than those with which we are familiar, but they also engage us in those lives, and Ms. Soomro's Unspoken achieves this. The reader is at once caught up in Sharmeen's life story. This fictional account of India's hardships and expectations for women should easily be on reading lists for college level women's studies courses -- but should also be on reading lists for anyone who seeks to understand our world a little bit better.
1239412
Never before have I read Khaled Hosseini, and never before have I been so profoundly enthralled.  This gem of a novel takes place within a myriad of stories and characters, going deep into the beautifully rugged, death defying mountainous, God-forsaken land they call Afghanistan.  From the opening pages, readers can look through a window far beyond the lens of the New York Times or Fox News.  Readers can witness the beauty, the tragedy, the struggle and small hopes of what it's like to live that war torn region.  Over the course of the novel and its numerous stories, people and relationships come and go.  Tragedy abides, yet hope reigns through it all.  It's A story that penetrates much more deeper than the murky political waters we see on TV.  Themes such as family, cultural progression and personal triumph reign supreme over a land war torn through religion and political ideologies.  Do yourself a favor fello reader, and pick it up.  Give it's day in court....
4013608
This first novel by Hosseini is remarkable on two counts. First, its character development and plot lines are self-assured and credible, and the main characters in the book linger long after the last page is read. Second, the novel contains an eloquent and moving picture of afghanistan before and during the taliban period seen through the eyes of afghanis, some who stayed and some who left. This portrait is so valuable that it should be required reading for those who choose to interfere in afghanistan's (and iraq's) affairs. (Fat chance, I'm afraid).

The main character, Amir, is not particularly likeable, which makes the novel even more compelling, though he certainly suffers from considerable self-disgust. Yet, without revealing the plot, more would have behaved like him than wouldn't.

We follow amir from a childhood that seems lyrical in retrospect through the soviet invasion, the puppet communist regime and the taliban. As the country trudges through horrendous regimes and horrific changes, amir struggles with his own demons and the rigid caste system of afghani society. The portrait of his father is particularly compelling and the use of kite running as a metaphor is beautifully done -- in he last few pages of the book it is heartbreaking, but hopeful. The immigrant perspective is enriched by the characters Hosseini creates and the limitations of personal history and background with which they contend.

It turns out that the publishers required Hosseini to rewrite the latter part of the book (source - NY Times). It's worth retrieving the relevant article AFTER you've read the book since it reveals some of the plot. The change they requested was a major improvement in what was already an interesting and compelling novel.

With the news from both Afghanistan and Iraq continuing its grim trajectory, the value of seeing Afghanistan through the eyes of an immigrant from that country is enormous. The book also presents the best view of the immigrant experience in America for a long time, even when compared to House of Sand and Fog, in itself no mean novel.

Hosseini is a doctor, but I hope his writing career continues. It will be fascinating to see (and read) his take on further experience as an Afghan American.