The Wish Maker
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £7.99
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
Zaki Shirazi has arrived back in Lahore, Pakistan, to celebrate the wedding of his childhood friend and elder cousin Samar Api to her long sought-after 'Amitabh' - a stand-in for the Bollywood star she always dreamed of marrying. Amidst the flurry of preparations in the house in which he grew up, Zaki can't help but revisit the past - his childhood as a fatherless boy growing up in a household of outspoken women and his and Samar's intertwined journeys from youth to adulthood.
Raised to consider themselves 'part of the same litter', Zaki and Samar watched American television together, memorized dialogues from Bollywood movies and attended dangerous protests with Zaki's campaigning, political journalist mother. But as Zaki becomes drawn into Samar's secret life of romantic schemes and lends her his support in trying to orchestrate the future, they both find themselves suffering the consequences . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The turbulence of contemporary Pakistani politics is refracted through the intimate prism of a fractious extended family in this mature debut, written when the author was 23. Twenty-year-old Zaki Shirazi, his military father dead before he was born, is raised with his rebellious female cousin Samar Api in a Lahore household dominated by his liberal mother, Zakia, editor of a crusading women's magazine, and his strong-willed, culturally conservative grandmother, Daadi. The nimble two-track narrative shifts between post-9/11, when Zaki returns from college in Massachusetts for Samar's wedding, and his childhood in the early 1990s, around the time then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, an act that polarized the country. The political background frames Sethi's complex narrative, but the primary focus is on the family's relatively privileged and often as argumentative as it is loving household, providing Western readers with an insider's atmospheric take on a culture and a country much in the news these days.
