As one opens this book showcasing two novellas from Pakistan and flips through the first few pages of each, one has no doubt that this is first rate writing from South Asia. A couple of years ago, Salman Rushdie had bemoaned the paucity of writing from the Indian subcontinent in good English translation. If he goes through these two Urdu novellas in English translation, he will have no such qualms. Without doubt these are the finest specimens of Urdu fiction in the best of translations.
August 2015, volume 39, No 8