Moth Smoke
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4.3 • 33 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Moth Smoke is the first novel by Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
'You know you're in trouble when you can't meet a woman's eye, particularly if the woman happens to be your best friend's wife.'
In Lahore, Daru Shezad is a junior banker with a hashish habit. When his old friend Ozi moves back to Pakistan, Daru wants to be happy for him. Ozi has everything: a beautiful wife and child, an expensive foreign education - and a corrupt father who bankrolls his lavish lifestyle.
As jealousy sets in, Daru's life slowly unravels. He loses his job. Starts lacing his joints with heroin. Becomes involved with a criminally-minded rickshaw driver. And falls in love with Ozi's lonely wife.
But how low can Daru sink? Is he guilty of the crime he finds himself on trial for?
'A vivid portrait of contemporary young Pakistani life, where frustration and insecurity feed not only the snobbery, decadence and aspirations of the rich, but also the resentment of the poor'The Times
'Fast-paced, intelligent . . . pulls us, despite ourselves, into its spiralling wake'New Yorker
'A subtly audacious . . .prodigious descendant of hard-boiled lit and film noir. A steamy and often darkly amusing book about sex, drugs, and class warfare in postcolonial Asia' Village Voice
'Stunning, a hip page-turner' Los Angeles Times
'Sharply observed, powerful, evocative' Financial Times
'A novel of remarkable wit, poise, profundity, and strangeness. A treat'Esquire
Mohsin Hamid is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, received numerous awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has contributed essays and short stories to publications such as the Guardian, The New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, and Paris Review. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he spent part of his childhood in California, studied at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and has since lived between Lahore, London, and New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamid subjects contemporary Pakistan to fierce scrutiny in his first novel, tracing the downward spiral of Darashikoh "Daru" Shezad, a young man whose uneasy status on the fringes of the Lahore elite is imperiled when he is fired from his job at a bank. Daru owes both the job and his education to his best friend Ozi's father, Khurram, a corrupt former official of one of the Pakistan regimes who has looked out for Daru ever since Daru's father, an old army buddy of Khurram's, died in the early '70s. As the story begins, Ozi has just returned from America, where he earned a college degree, with his wife, Mumtaz, and child. From the moment they meet, Daru and Mumtaz are drawn to each other. Mumtaz is fascinated by Daru's air of suppressed violence, and Daru is intrigued by Mumtaz's secret career as an investigative journalist; the two share a taste for recreational drugs, sex and sports. But their affair really begins after Daru witnesses Ozi, driving recklessly, mow down a teenage boy and flee the scene. Daru decides then that Ozi is morally bankrupt. But as Daru becomes more dependent on drugs, the arrogance he himself has absorbed from his upper-class upbringing stands out in stark contrast to his circumstances. Daru's noirish, first-person account of his moral descent, culminating with murder, interweaves with chapters written in the distinctive voices of the other characters. One in particular comes vividly to life: Murad Badshah, a sort of Pakastani Falstaff, officially the head of a rickshaw company, but kept afloat by drug dealing and robbery. Hamid's tale, played out against the background of Pakistan's recent testing of a nuclear device, creates a powerful image of an insecure society toying with its own dissolution.
Customer Reviews
Couldn’t put it down
I love this book which describes brilliantly the emotional fissures of two childhood friends meeting up again as adults and the reappraisal that takes place as their lives have diverged while apart. It is a sharp critique on the arrogance of the elite in Pakistan, displayed by all three protagonists. It is also a story of love, rejection, jealousy and revenge. The events unfold against the backdrop of summer in Lahore, painted with an integrity of wonderful descriptions that gives the reader the sense of witnessing them first hand. Moshin Hamid , the modern day Manto construes the understated hero of the story as a young street wraith who has been turned from a life of crime to one of compassion and caring for others while the masters degenerate into a life of either judicial or social crime.