Maps for Lost Lovers

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184003307
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
Set in a nameless British town that its Pakistani-born immigrants have renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the Desert of Solitude, Maps for Lost Lovers is an exploration of cultural tension and religious bigotry played out in the personal breakdown of a single family. As the book begins, Jugnu and Chanda, whose love is both passionate and illicit, have disappeared from their home. Rumours about their disappearance abound, but five months pass before anything certain is known. Finally, on a snow-covered January morning, Chanda’s brothers are arrested for the murder of their sister and Jugnu. Maps for Lost Lovers traces the year following Jugnu and Chanda’s disappearance. Seen principally through the eyes of Jugnu’s brother Shamas, the cultured, poetic director of the local Community Relations Council and Commission for Racial Equality, and his wife Kaukab, mother of three increasingly estranged children and devout daughter of a Muslim cleric, the event marks the beginning of the unravelling of all that is sacred to them. It fills Shamas’s own house and life with grief and, in exploring the lovers’ disappearance and its aftermath, Nadeem Aslam discloses a legacy of miscomprehension and regret not only for Shamas and Kaukab but for their children and neighbours as well. An intimate portrait of a community searingly damaged by traditions, this is a densely imagined, beautiful and deeply troubling book written in heightened prose saturated with imagery. It casts a deep gaze on themes as timeless as love, nationalism and religion, while meditating on how these forces drive us apart.

Maps for Lost Lovers

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057128678X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
In an unnamed town Jugnu and his lover Chanda have disappeared. Rumours abound in the close-knit Pakistani community, and then on a snow-covered January morning Chanda's brothers are arrested for murder. Telling the story of the next twelve months, Maps for Lost Lovers opens the heart of a family at the crossroads of culture, community, nationality and religion, and expresses their pain in a language that is arrestingly poetic. 'This is a deeply pastoral novel, tied to the seasons and resonating with birdsong . . . Like Aslam, I was heartbroken when the dense, dark tapestry was finished.' Independent on Sunday 'Despite the violence that lies at the heart of the novel, it is a celebration of love and life. Sights and sounds, smells and colours are not so much vivid backdrops for the narrative as structural, mood- and texture-enhancing parts of it . . . This is that rare sort of book that gives a voice to those voices that are seldom heard.' Observer

Season of the Rainbirds

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385678010
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Book Description
The first novel by the author of Maps for Lost Lovers: a powerful and exquisitely written story set in a small town in Pakistan after the murder of a corrupt and prominent local judge. When a sack of letters that were thought to have disappeared in a train crash nineteen years earlier reappears under mysterious circumstances, the inhabitants of a secluded Pakistani village wait anxiously to see what secrets may come to light. Could the letters hold any information about Judge Anwar's murder? As Aslam traces the murder investigation over the next eleven days, he explores the impact that these two events have on a variety of people in the town--from the surviving family of the judge to a journalist reporting on the delivery of the mail packet. With great attention to detail and beautiful scenes that explore the daily rhythms of life in Pakistan, Aslam creates an exotic and timeless world whose traditional rituals are played out against an ominous backdrop of faraway civil wars, assassinations, changing regimes, and religious tensions.

The Wasted Vigil

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184003455
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus’s daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan—as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.

The Golden Legend

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451493796
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
When shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road in the fictional Pakistani city of Zamara, Nargis’s life begins to crumble around her. Soon her husband—and fellow architect—is dead and, under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, she fears that a long-hidden truth about her past will be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people’s secrets from the minaret of the local mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. A revelatory portrait of the human spirit, in The Golden Legend, Nadeem Aslam gives us a novel of Pakistan’s past and present—a story of corruption and resilience, of love and terror, and of the disguises that are sometimes necessary for survival.

The Blind Man's Garden

Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184003919
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.

The Map of Lost Memories

Author: Kim Fay
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0345531345
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Teaming up in 1925 Shanghai to find a priceless set of scrolls believed to contain the lost history of the Khmer empire, Irene Blum and temple-robber Simone Merlin commit a shockingly violent act before discovering unexpected commonalities in their respective pasts. A first novel by the award-winning author of Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. 30,000 first printing.

The Map of Love

Author: Ahdaf Soueif
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307783553
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Book Description
Booker Prize Finalist Here is an extraordinary cross-cultural love story that unfurls across Egypt, England, and the United States over the course of a century. Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist, has fallen in love with a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor. Shadowing her romance is the courtship of her great-grandparents Anna and Sharif nearly one hundred years before. In 1900 the recently widows Anna Winterbourne left England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with political sentiment. She soon found herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, an Egyptian nationalist. When Isabel, in an attempt to discover the truth behind her heritage, reenacts Anna’s excursion to Egypt, the story of her great-grandparents unravels before her, revealing startling parallels for her own life. Combining the romance and intricate narrative of a nineteenth-century novel with a very modern sense of culture and politics—both sexual and international—Ahdaf Soueif has created a thoroughly seductive and mesmerizing tale.

A Land Remembered

Author: Patrick D Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1561645826
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
A Land Remembered has become Florida's favorite novel. Now this Student Edition in two volumes makes this rich, rugged story of the American pioneer spirit more accessible to young readers. Patrick Smith tells of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family battling the hardships of the frontier. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias and Emma MacIvey arrive in the Florida wilderness with their son, Zech, to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that his wealth has not been worth the cost to the land. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history with a cast of memorable characters who battle wild animals, rustlers, Confederate deserters, mosquitoes, starvation, hurricanes, and freezes to carve a kingdom out of the Florida swamp. In this volume, meet young Zech MacIvey, who learns to ride like the wind through the Florida scrub on Ishmael, his marshtackie horse, his dogs, Nip and Tuck, at this side. His parents, Tobias and Emma, scratch a living from the land, gathering wild cows from the swamp and herding them across the state to market. Zech learns the ways of the land from the Seminoles, with whom his life becomes entwined as he grows into manhood. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series

Maps

Author: James R. Akerman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Introducing readers to a wide range of maps from different time periods and a variety of cultures, this book confirms the vital roles of maps throughout history in commerce, art, literature, and national identity.