DREAM REVIEW IN HERALD'S LAST ISSUE -- so bittersweet

After 50 years, Pakistan's leading monthly magazine, Herald, is suspending publication. A huge, huge loss--I've always loved reading and occasionally writing for one of the few media outlets in Pakistan to consistently support art and culture, while providing bold, in-depth coverage of local and global events. Though so bittersweet, I couldn't be more honored that in this last issue, my novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali has gotten an expansive, detailed, beautiful review by the writer Osama Siddique. It's a review to dream of--a three-page spread about the prose, as well as the specificity and universality, past and present, of the novel's context. An excerpt:

'In important ways, even more so than a good history book, it is good fiction that is truly capable of capturing not just what it is factually known to have transpired but also the attendant hopes, dreams, and emotions of a people and an era. Such a work of fiction miraculously lifts the mists of collective forgetfulness. The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali performs that vital and welcome miracle ... The voices of the past have been successfully captured and amplified by this remarkable novel ... (with a) dream-like quality to (the) beautiful prose. (It) is a novel about pain, loss and systematic exploitation but ultimately, it is also about injustice that transcends time and locale. And yet ... it does  not obfuscate injustice as a neutral, ahistorical and decontextualized phenomenon. It provides no leeway for the unjust to breathe easy. In Khan's politics, the ingloriousness of empires, the tyranny of the oppressors and suffering of the victims are not abstract ideas. She engages with these ideas through specific stories with a definite history and a particular geography--a history and geography that keep repeating ... At the same time, all that in no way prevents her from also successfully exploring the universality of the phenomena. Therein lies the great success of the novel.'

With so much gratitude to the magazine and the reviewer.