The Runaways
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Fatima Bhutto vividly renders the seductions of Islamic radicalization . . . and its universal roots in idealism and desire, rage and romance, youth and rebellion” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer).
The lives of three radicalized Muslim teenagers—two from Pakistan, one from the United Kingdom—intersect in the Iraqi desert as they travel to a jihadi training camp in Mosul.
Anita lives in Karachi’s biggest slum. Her mother is a maalish wali, paid to massage the tired bones of rich women. But Anita’s life will change forever when she meets her elderly neighbor, a man whose shelves of books promise an escape to a different world.
On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when a beautiful and rebellious girl joins his school, Monty will find his life going in a very different direction.
Sunny’s father left India and went to England to give his son the opportunities he never had. Yet Sunny doesn't fit in anywhere. It’s only when his charismatic cousin comes back into his life that he realizes his life could hold more possibilities than he ever imagined.
These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bhutto (The Shadow of the Crescent Moon) tells the wrenching story of three young people brought together in a jihadist training camp run in Iraq. Anita Rose Joseph, 16, grows up poor in Karachi and yearns for the kind of life enjoyed by her better-off schoolmates. After a neighbor introduces her to political radicalism via Urdru poetry, she is eager to learn more. Meanwhile, Sunny Jamil, 19, grows up in Portsmouth, England, a motherless child of Pakistani immigrants. Unsure about his sexuality and not fitting in with the other immigrant families or the English around him, he is lured out of isolation by jihadi radicalization. Monty Ahmed, 17, comes from a wealthy family Pakistani family and is relatively happy. After his girlfriend, Layla, disappears from Karachi, he follows her footsteps to Mosul, where new recruits are lured by her calls to arms via LiveLeak. Told in alternate chapters from the points of view of all three protagonists, the book moves forward and backward, explaining their motivations in spare, almost jaunty prose that elicits empathy for the troubled teens and stands in stark contrast to the seriousness of the plot. Bhutto's penetrating character study convinces all the way to the inevitable bloody end.
