The Wish Maker
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the world-renowned singer-songwriter, a debut novel about a fatherless boy growing up in a family of outspoken women in contemporary Pakistan, The Wish Maker is a brilliant tale about sacrifice, betrayal, and indestructible friendship.
Zaki Shirazi and his female cousin Samar Api were raised to consider themselves “part of the same litter.” In a household run by Zaki's crusading political journalist mother and iron-willed grandmother, it was impossible to imagine a future that could hold anything different for each of them. But when adolescence approaches, the cousins’ fates diverge, and Zaki is forced to question the meaning of family, selfhood, and commitment to those he loves most.
Chronicling world-changing events that have never been so intimately observed in fiction, and brimming with unmistakable warmth and humor, The Wish Maker is the powerful account of a family and an era, a story that shows how, even in the most rapidly shifting circumstances, there are bonds that survive the tugs of convention, time, and history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The turbulence of contemporary Pakistani politics is refracted through the intimate prism of a fractious extended family in this mature debut, written when the author was 23. Twenty-year-old Zaki Shirazi, his military father dead before he was born, is raised with his rebellious female cousin Samar Api in a Lahore household dominated by his liberal mother, Zakia, editor of a crusading women's magazine, and his strong-willed, culturally conservative grandmother, Daadi. The nimble two-track narrative shifts between post-9/11, when Zaki returns from college in Massachusetts for Samar's wedding, and his childhood in the early 1990s, around the time then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, an act that polarized the country. The political background frames Sethi's complex narrative, but the primary focus is on the family's relatively privileged and often as argumentative as it is loving household, providing Western readers with an insider's atmospheric take on a culture and a country much in the news these days.
