Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code-a letter that could only have been written recently.Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother?Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

“A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces.” —Madeline Miller “A shining tour de force about a long friendship’s respects, disrespects, loyalties and moralities.” —Ali Smith From the acclaimed author of Home Fire, the moving and surprising story of a lifelong friendship and the forces that bring it to the breaking point Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though—or maybe because—they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future.   Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock...

Hasan is eleven years old. He loves cricket, pomegranates, the night sky, his clever, vibrant artistic mother and his etymologically obsessed lawyer father, and he adores his next-door neighbour Zehra. One early summer morning, while lazing happily on the roof, Hasan watches a young boy flying a yellow kite fall to his death. Soon after, Hasan's idyllic, sheltered family life is shattered when his beloved uncle Salman, a dissenting politician, is arrested and charged with treason... Set in a land ruled by an oppresive military regime, this eloquent, charming and quietly political novel vividly recreates the confusing world of a young boy on the edge of adulthood, and beautifully illustrates the transformative power of the imagination.

"Ingenious... Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I've read in a novel this century." —The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequencesIsma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she's accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma's worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a...

In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, joins an archaeological dig in Turkey, fulfilling a long-held dream. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist Tahsin Bey and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. But the outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her new friends become her nation's enemies.Thousands of miles away, twenty-year-old Pathan Qayyum Gul is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. When he loses an eye in battle and is sent to England to recuperate, his allegiances falter.Returning home at last, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose, whose continued search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Many years later, the two cross paths again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.

Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to each others' partners until they rematched in what they call "the fiancée swap." But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents' exchange. What she uncovers reveals not just a family's but a country's turbulent history - and a grown-up Raheen and Karim are caught between strained friendship and fated love.A love story with a family mystery at its heart, Kartography is a dazzling novel by a young writer of astonishing maturity and exhilarating style. Shamsie transports us to a world we have not often seen in fiction - vibrant, dangerous, sensuous Pakistan. But even as she takes us far from the familiar, her story of passion and family secrets rings universally true.

A powerful, sweeping epic crossing generations, cultures and continentsIn a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders...August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee...

Aliya may not have inherited her family's patrician looks, but she is as much a prey to the legends of her family that stretch back to the days of Timur Lang. Aristocratic and eccentric-the clan has plenty of stories to tell, and secrets to hide. Like salt and saffron, which both flavor food but in slightly different ways, it is the small, subtle differences that cause the most trouble in Aliya's family. The family problems and scandals caused by these minute differences echo the history of the sub-continent and the story of Partition.A superb storyteller, Kamila Shamsie writes with warmth and gusto. Through the many anecdotes about Pakistani family life, she hints at the larger tale of a divided nation. Spanning the subcontinent from the Muslim invasions to the Partition, this is a magical novel about the shapes stories can take- turning into myths, appearing in history books and entering into our lives.