Kartography
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
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'A boisterous tribute to her home town that crackles with the chaos of Pakistani political life' - The Times
'Deftly woven and provocative ... Shamsie's blistering humour and ear for dialogue scorches through their whirl of whisky and witticisms' - Observer
'You will notice very quickly that you're reading a book by someone who can write … Above all, Kartography is a love story. And if you're not sniffling by, or in fact on, page 113, you're reading the wrong book' - Guardian
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BY THE ACCLAIMED WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE
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Soul mates from birth, Karim and Raheen finish one another's sentences, speak in anagrams and lie spine to spine. They are irrevocably bound to one another and to Karachi, Pakistan. It beats in their hearts - violent, polluted, corrupt, vibrant, brave and ultimately, home. As the years go by they let a barrier of silence build between them until, finally, they are brought together during a dry summer of strikes and ethnic violence and their relationship is poised between strained friendship and fated love.
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'Perceptive, funny and poignant' - Times Literary Supplement
'A touching love story, with the city of Karachi beating at its heart' - Daily Mail
'A gorgeous novel of perimeters and boundaries, of the regions – literal and figurative – in which we're comfortable moving about and those through which we'd rather not travel' - Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The trauma of war is typically gauged by loss of lives and property, not broken hearts, but the microcosm is often as powerful an indicator of loss as the macrocosm or so Shamsie seems to say in her latest novel, a shimmering, quick-witted lament and love story. Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, is a place under constant siege: ethnic, factional, sectarian and simply random acts of violence are the order of the day. This violence and the lingering legacy of the civil war of 1971 is the backdrop for the story of Raheen and Karim, a girl and boy raised together in the 1970s and '80s, whose lives are shattered when a family secret is revealed. The two friends and their families are members of the city's wealthy elite, personified in its shallowness by family members like Raheen's supercilious Aunt Runty and in guilty social conscience by Karim himself. This is a complex novel, deftly executed and rich in emotional coloraturaand wordplay (the title is inspired by Karim's burgeoning obsession with mapmaking, and spelled with a "k" after the city's name). Shamsie pays homage to Calvino with a pastiche of Invisible Cities written by Raheen at her upstate New York college. But Shamsie's novel deals more with ghosts than cities: ghosts of relationships, ghosts of childhood, ghosts of love. A ghost is said to haunt a tree where Raheen's father once engaged to Karim's mother carved their initials long ago. Two ghosts representing Karim and Raheen walk an invisible city in Raheen's Calvino tribute. As someone said to Raheen: "There's a ghost of a dream you don't even try to shake free of because you're too in love with the way she haunts you." In similar fashion, Raheen remains in love with Karachi, family and friends, even as one by one their facades crumble.
