Husain Haqqani:
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer (Times Books, 2013) narrates the story of two powerful brothers who, inspired by their messianic zeal, expanded the cold war. John Foster Dulles served as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State while Allen was head of the CIA during the crucial 1950s. Both brothers believed in American exceptionalism and had a religiously-motivated abhorrence for communism. Their crusade to save the world from communism led the United States into pursuing a secret war involving military coups, assassination of leaders and unholy alliances that have influenced how many non-Americans view America. Although the U.S. Congress shut down many of the operations initiated by the Dulles brothers, their actions in Iran, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, among others, still form the basis of anti-Americanism around the world. Kinzer, author of the much acclaimed ‘All the Shah’s Men,’ is also a wonderful story-teller.
Husain Haqqani is Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United States and most recently the author of ‘Magnificent Delusions – Pakistan, The United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding’.
Aamer Hussein:
Laksmi Pamuntjak is internationally known as a poet. She is also a fine essayist and short story writer. The Question of Red, her first and long-awaited novel, is the author’s own English version of her bestselling Indonesian novel Amba. Red is the colour of the ideology of the communists who are brutally purged between 1965 and 1968. It’s also the colour of blood, and of Amba’s passion for radical doctor Bhisma. This is a brilliant reconstruction of a tragic time before the author’s birth. As the protagonists’ names imply, Pamuntjak is also inspired by one of the lesser-known stories of the Mahabharata. History, myth and Javanese literature are intertwined in this epic novel, which evokes inevitable and favourable comparisons with the work of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Umar Kayam. Pamuntjak’s approach is original and innovative, not least for its narration of political events through the experience of a brave woman.
Aamer Hussein, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the acclaimed author of four short story collections as well as the novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and the novel The Cloud Messenger (2011)
Musharraf Ali Farooqi:
For me the Great Urdu Novel is Kai Chaand Thhay Sar-e Aasman by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, published in the author’s own English language translation as The Mirror of Beauty (Penguin , 2013). It tells the story of Wazir Khanam whose life is foreshadowed by a series of private histories terminating abruptly and often tragically. We know of many great male intellectuals from nineteenth century India. In this novel, and in the person of Wazir Khanam, we are introduced to the world of a brilliant female intellectual whose integration and rise in the society on her own terms has been portrayed both with artistic brilliance and attention to historic facts. Having followed the fortunes of this novel from its first publication in Urdu, to its translation into English and rapturous reception, it still surprises me that Wazir Khanam has not been claimed yet as one of the great icons of feminism in the nineteenth century.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a translator and an author, most recently of the Man-Asian Literary Prize nominee, ‘Between Clay and Dust’
Bilal Tanweer:
The best book I read this year was the novel, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It’s an odd little book: a meditative letter written by a dying old priest to his son. It is not a confession of misdeeds; in fact, quite the contrary. The pastor has led an ordinary life in a small (fictional) Midwestern town of Gilead, Iowa, without much drama or scandal. The heft of the book is formed by small observations of daily life from the lens of somebody who is painfully aware of his looming death, and for that reason, he is alive to the marvels and mysteries of everyday existence. Read any review of this book and the word that will recur is ‘wisdom’ — i.e., knowledge of how to live with grace. I also find this novel to be one of the most original engagements with the question of religious experience.
All this aside, the real genius of the book for me is that it is one book that does not seem to be interested in emulating any other book or to be anything other than what it is: a small, humble, bracingly honest, deeply personal conversation of a dying father with his son about things he cares about. There is no performance in its pages, and for that reason, very little anxiety: of influence or appeasing critical discourse or about its reception in the world. The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that such a book exists in a world like ours. Or that it won so many plaudits and awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Award. One can only be grateful for impossible books such as this one.
Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, has been published by Random House India
Sonia Faleiro:
My book of the year is Cobalt Blue written by the Marathi playwright Sachin Kundalkar and translated by author Jerry Pinto. A middle class family in the city of Pune in Maharashtra rents out an attic room for cash, and in doing so allows a mysterious young man into their home and the hearts of both their son and daughter. This is a slim, sensual book written in a direct conversational style that makes for very pleasurable reading. I’m passionate about regional Indian fiction, and this unusual and important narrative, so controversial when it was first published many years ago, and the equal of which you won’t find in Indian English, is one reason why.
Sonia Faleiro is the writer, most recently, of ‘Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars’
Shazaf Fatima Haider:
I read Helen Simonson’s book, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by the poolside in Arkansas during my vacation. I savored it slowly, like a cup of green tea, taking small, careful sips at a time.
The first sip introduces you to Edgecombe, a small village in the English countryside: one of those old, shire-like places with an old fusty major who keeps up tradition and is suspicious of modernity. A second sip will introduce you to Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper who, like the major, is conservation and loves to read. In fact, they connect over his library and his garden and are people of imagination. But the village is small and the minds of the villagers even smaller. Throw into the mix Mrs. Ali’s nephew and his troubled view of religion, love and the baby he’s fathered with a white woman and you get sentences like this one: ‘“Look here, it’s all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white…..It’s a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders. However, philosophical rigidity is usually combined with a complete lack of education or real-world experience, and it is often augmented with strange haircuts and an aversion to bathing.” I’ll leave you with this piquant flavor of a brilliantly delicious book. It’s everything a good story should be; and it should not be missed.
Shazaf Fatima Haider is the author of ‘How It Happened’ published by Penguin Books, India
Tazeen Javed:
This year, I read a lot and have read almost all the books that are being mentioned in the year-end lists – Tenth of December or The Goldfinch or Life after Life – and they are all excellent books but the one I am going to recommend is Worst.Person.Ever.
Written by Douglas Coupland – a very prolific Canadian writer and visual artist – this is a hilarious account of Raymon Gunt, a cameraman and his formerly homeless and cardboard box-living assistant Neal’s flight from London to LA to Honolulu to Kiribati, to shoot a survivor type reality show. Gunt is a most politically incorrect person and mocks everything from homeless people to Duran Duran to Reality TV to Billy Elliot to Americans (obvious targets) and manages to win the readers over with his brand of zany.
The book will probably not win any awards but it will make you laugh out loud if dark comedy is your thing. As a pop culture enthusiast with appreciation for English absurdity, I loved this book. It should be appreciated even more because a polite Canadian like Coupland has written a text that is hilarious, profane and oh so terribly English.
Tazeen Javed writes humorous essays for The Friday Times and is one of Pakistan’s most popular bloggers
Nandini Krishnan:
It’s dangerous to label a book you’ve just read your ‘all-time favourite’, but Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy spoke to me in a way no other novel has. Intimacy spans a day in the life of the narrator, as he contemplates leaving an insipid marriage that has produced adorable children, whose giggles and antics make him ache to be able to stay on. Through his memories and conflicted thoughts, we see him struggling with his love for the boys, his guilt over past cruelties, and confusion at the choices he has made. An intensely personal story becomes universal. Heartbreakingly, he often thinks that if something were to happen – if his wife were to allow him to make love to her, if she were to hold his hand in bed – he won’t leave. That aspect of the book reminded me of an article I once read, about people who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. One of them had left a suicide note saying, “If one person smiles at me on the way, I won’t jump”. Intimacy stays with you not only for the complexity of thought and emotion, but also for the prose. Nearly every line makes you want to put the book down, think about it for a few minutes, and then read it again. Yet, the book never gets heavy, thanks to Kureishi’s wonderful sense of irony.
Nandini Krishnan is The Friday Times’ movie reviewer and author of ‘Hitched: The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage’
