The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi

Zaki Shirazi returns to Lahore to celebrate the wedding of his cousin and childhood companion Samar Api (who has finally, it seems, found her Amitabh). Home is not what it used to be; Musharraf is in power, there has been a boom, and Lahore seems to have seen ‘too much too soon’. Zaki’s estrangement, amidst the flurry of wedding preparations in the house he grew up in, takes him back to his past: his childhood as a fatherless boy growing up in a household of outspoken women, and his and Samar’s intertwined journeys from youth to adulthood.
As children, they often attended dangerous political protests with Zaki’s journalist mother. Surrounded by the mysterious talk of adults, only Zaki seemed to share his older cousin’s yearning for the perfect world. Inspired by American soaps and Bollywood films that they watched together, their world held the promise of all sorts of forbidden love. Then, when Zaki supports one of Samar’s romantic schemes, the family suffers the disastrous consequences. But as his fate diverges from Samar’s, he comes to understand the world around him better, and to cherish the bonds that survive the tugs of convention, time and history.
Book Reviews
‘The Wish Maker, in Ali Sethi’s mature and sure-handed prose, is an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and anilluminating look at one of the world’s most turbulent regions. Ali Sethi steadfastly resists the usual clichés about both Islam and his native country. Instead, he offers a nuanced, often humorous, and always novel look at life in modern day Pakistan’ —Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
‘The Wish Maker is a confident and personal debut. Ali Sethi’s is a fresh voice from a new generation of Pakistani novelists’ —Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist