About the Book
Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place, particularly for women. Traveling alone from the isolated mountain village where he was born, a tribal man takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the glittering city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, he makes his fortune and a home for the two of them. Yet, as the years pass, he grows nostalgic for his life in the mountains, and his fifteen-year-old daughter envisions a romantic landscape, filled with tall men who roam the mountains like gods. Impulsively, the man promises his daughter in marriage to a man of his tribe. But once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate as the bride of an inscrutable husband impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no return.
Prescient and provocative in its assessment of the plight of women in tribal society in Pakistan, the first of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels is a story of marriage and commitment, of the conflict between adherence to tradition and the indomitable force of a woman’s spirit. The Houston Chronicle raves, “There is a Kiplingesque quality to Sidhwa’s writing, the congenital ability to make one feel the ambiance of the locale: the stifling heat, the poverty, and yet the warmth which exists between families…”
Don’t miss…
New York reading
Aicon Gallery
206 Fifth Ave. (bet. 26th & 27th St), NYC.
Tuesday March 18, 6:30-8:30 pm
Information: Indo-American Arts Council Inc, 146West 29th St, Suite 7R3, New York, NY 10001
Phone: 212 594 3685 Email admin@iaac.us
and
Houston reading:
Brazos Bookstore
2421 Bissonnet | Houston | TX | 77005
Thursday April 3, 6:00 pm
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