A world-class tale of love and deceit, rivalry and destiny in a truly masterful and thoroughly involving novel from the Lahore-based writer Uzma Aslam Khan.
'Daanish thought of the gazelle-eyed girl in the blue dupatta. If she returned, he wanted to be the first to talk to her. He wanted to tell her he'd followed her advice and found out what she'd left. He wanted also to look more closely at that smooth caramel face with the gracefully tapering chin. But he'd not see her again. Did he even remember her correctly?'
Daanish will remember her, the girl Dia. She is his future and his past. They come together by chance, he from far away over the ocean, from Amreeka, where there are plenty of rules but few restrictions. She is local, but of the new breed of women - unrestricted, spirited and resourceful, just like her mother, the entrepreneur, the silk farmer.
And it is a handful of silkworms, fattened on mulberry leaves, slipped inside a friend's dupatta, cocoons tickling skin, that, in rupturing the peace and plans of a household, make the space - noisy like the sea in a shell - in which Dia and Daanish can create something new, all over again.
Meanwhile, all around them new ways drive out old, as new hatreds are manufactured and old ones revived, and new rules are made and then broken.
The architecture of this novel is intricately and delicately made, the characters - and their destinies - utterly clear before us and compelling; the collision between individuals and the societies that constrict and construct them can be felt on every page.
There is behind all a sense of doom, and of doom repeated, of black clouds promising dramatic storms, that drives the reader hurriedly through the book seeking shelter - for the characters they come to love as much as for themselves. It is a novel of our times for our times, and Flamingo feels confident that many readers will adore it.
