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.
KAMILA SHAMSIE's first novel, In the City by the Sea, was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. After her second novel, Salt and Saffron, she was named one of the Orange Futures "21 Writers for the 21st century". A recipient of the Award for Literary Achievement in Pakistan, she lives in Karachi and London, where she writes frequently for The Guardian.
What People are Saying About This
Herman Fong
"An utterly riveting tale. Shamsie has created one of the most compelling characters to appear in recent fiction." --(Herman Fong, The Odyssey Bookshop)
