Kartography
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A “gorgeous novel” of two upper-class Pakistani families and the complicated love that develops between their children, by the author of Home Fire (Los Angeles Times).
Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to one another’s partners, until they rematched in what they call “the fiancée swap.” But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents’ exchange. What she uncovers reveals not just a family’s turbulent history, but also a country’s—and now a grown-up Raheen and Karim are caught between strained friendship and fated love.
A love story with a family mystery at its heart, from an author named as one of the Orange Prize’s “21 Writers for the 21st Century,” Kartography transports readers to a world not often seen in fiction: vibrant, dangerous, sensuous Pakistan.
“[Shamsie] has been described as a young Anita Desai, and her third book, about childhood, love, life and high society in Karachi during the turbulent 1990s, is worth all the prepublication fuss.” —Harper’s Bazaar
“[Shamsie] packs her story with the playful evidence of her high-flying intelligence.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“E. M. Forster’s famous plea—‘only connect’—reverberates passionately throughout this forceful tale of childhood, love and the power of story-telling.” —The Independent (UK)
“Deftly woven, provocative . . . Shamsie’s blistering humor and ear for dialogue scorches through [a] whirl of whiskey and witticisms.” —The Observer (UK)
“A shimmering, quick-witted lament and love story . . . Rich in emotional coloratura and wordplay.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Its artful uncovering of how people hide from themselves and one another . . . echoes Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” —Kirkus Reviews
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.
