Impunity

A girl awakens to the ruthlessness of her powerful family, and the complicity that sustains it

For seven-year-old Nyla, her family’s lush Karachi garden has always been domain enough. Then one day her father brings home a surprise: a girl whose rhyming name—Lyla—seems to confirm their instant sense of kinship even as she hints at a difficult life beyond the compound’s gates. But as suddenly as she arrives, Lyla is sent away, and Nyla understands that there is no one—not her adored father or aggrieved mother, not her many cousins, not even her brother, Middle, and certainly not intimidating Uncle—she can ask why. And yet this brief encounter plants a seed of knowing. Over the years it will steer Nyla’s fate, until at last she comes face to face with what it means to belong to a family where little is as it seems, that holds the sky up only over its own, and that regards anything less than blind allegiance as betrayal.

At once searingly intimate and propulsive, Impunity is Shamsie at her most affecting and most immersive.