The most recommended books about Pakistan

I think of myself as an adventurous traveler, but Dervla Murphy travels in a way that I would never even consider.

So, it’s a pleasure to sit in a comfortable chair and read about places I’ll never visit and people who I’d love to meet, but never will. Murphy writes so vividly I feel as though I am right beside her as she fends off wolves, struggles to drag a bicycle uphill through mountain snow, and shares tea with nomads.

This was her first book and every book that follows is equally compelling.

It is all too easy to forget that when Britain went to war in 1939, it did so as the world’s largest imperial power. Khan’s book is a rich social history of India at war, telling us the stories of not only the soldiers, but the business owners, the peasants, the refugees, and the political activists whose lives were shaped by war in the Indian subcontinent. The flawed political settlement that brought independence and partition to India and Pakistan was born out of the Raj’s experience of war, and this book gives voice to those who experienced this most turbulent time in the region’s recent history.

The book takes the reader through seven decades of a tumultuous history of relations between the two countries. I love this book because it is an easy and fun read, the writing style is light, and there are lots of anecdotes. As a student of history and international relations, the book appealed to me at multiple levels. The book will appeal to practitioners, academics, and the average reader.

In the early 1980s, when I lived in Lahore, Pakistan, and served on the board of the Lahore American School—an institution that catered to rich Pakistanis and expats whose commercial companies paid the high tuition—I talked to a fourth-grade class whose Pakistani teacher was a close friend. She alerted me twenty years later that one of those students had just published his first novel, describing the fast life of the affluent and often decadent Pakistanis who lived in mansions, partied till dawn, drank heavily, and engaged, it was rumored, in romantic liaisons with each other’s spouses.

Moth Smoke describes this life, with a main character who falls in love with a friend’s wife while losing his job and turning to the sale of heroin and hashish to survive.  Mohsin takes the reader through a bittersweet recounting of life in the fast lane in modern Pakistan, a life I observed for… show more.

Days and Nights in Calcutta is a fascinating dual view of the same time and place by a husband and wife, both highly esteemed writers. The couple has returned to her family home in the famously complex and crowded Indian city and this is the account-in-two-voices of their year there. His feels full of wonder and surprise; it has a sunlit quality. Hers feels full of intensity and concern; it is tightly wrought. The book shows me not just India, a place I love to see and feel, but the importance of everyone’s story and view.

This book has rightly become a classic in the field and is a book I keep returning to for Mernissi’s fantastic insights into the particularities of queenship in the Islamic world and her fascinating examples of the agency of royal women. Mernissi’s passion for the subject, and for the wider history of women’s political agency in the Islamic world springs from the page, making this an absorbing read. A more recent work that builds on Mernissi’s book and is also highly recommended is Shahla Haeri’s The Unforgettable Queens of Islam - both Mernissi and Haeri make clear connections between royal women of the premodern era and modern female politicians today.

I am a sucker for Jane Austen retellings, and this one is my favorite. Kamal’s characters are as vivid as their original inspirations from Pride and Prejudice.

The Pakistani setting also adds a layer of complexity. Even as the novel sweeps charmingly along, moments of social commentary cut through the lightness. Perhaps most satisfying is how Charlotte Lucas, here Sherry Looclus, gets a happier ending. 

This is the story of a family in India, centering around an aging mother and grandmother. It is a well-observed account of family dynamics.

Ma is in search of her younger self, lost in the violent upheavals of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. My reading group friends were divided over this book, mostly because of its substantial length, but I found it delightful and it has stayed with me. An often joyous, sometimes nightmarish, baggy novel full of whimsical flights of fancy with butterflies, blackbirds, crows, saris, and bangles.

You can wander around in this book and become part of this family. I enjoyed the unusual form of the novel. It is presented in mostly very short chapters, which punctuate the flow of the text like the stanzas of a poem, as Shree explores consciousness, borders, and divisions.

The majority of my teaching career was in Regent Park, so the setting of Looking for X is particularly meaningful. Eleven-year-old Khyber is smart, savvy, and mature beyond her years. Told from Khyber’s POV, the story centers around the friendship she develops with X, a woman living in the parkette across from Khyber’s apartment building. When Khyber witnesses X being attacked a group of skinheads, the dangers faced by Toronto’s homeless population, especially those living with mental illness, become glaringly clear. The next day, Khyber is wrongly accused of vandalizing her school. X is the only person who can provide an alibi for Khyber, but she is nowhere to be found. In an effort to locate her friend, Khyber embarks on a a journey navigating the urban landscape of Toronto. 

I learned how much food is wasted while so many people are hungry: in the USA, half of all food is wasted, and in the United Kingdom, 20 million tonnes of food are thrown out each year. Yet I also gained an implicit and unintended message: we need more than a good idea. I became certain that, although we need to understand the situation and have a plan, in industrialized countries, most dietary problems reflect a human reluctance to change behavior.  

It became clear to me that we need to factor in human behavior and offer more than good advice. Good ideas are often stymied by the reluctance of humans to change what they eat. For me, the unintended takeaway message was that the failure of attempts to encourage healthy eating, to a large extent, reflects paying too much attention to food. Rather, you need to concentrate on people as… show more.