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The 2007 Award

Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie


 

 

Nominated by:

  • Quaid-e-Azam Library, Lahore, Pakistan

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition
Harvest / Harcourt ISBN 0156030535

 

the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK
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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kamila Shamsie is the author of four novels. She lives in London and Karachi and serves as a visiting professor of English at Hamilton College.


 

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