Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely celebrated as the finest novelist produced by her country—the New York Times called her "Pakistan's finest English-language novelist." She is the author of several novels, including Cracking India, The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, The Pakistani Bride, and Water, which received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest honor in the arts, and the Sir Sayed Day Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. She lives in Houston.
Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place. When a young bride from Lahore arrives in these mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no return.
Growing up in Pakistan in the 1970s, Feroza Ginwalla is precocious, impetuous, and increasingly affected by the rising tide of religious fundamentalism there. When her family decides to send her to America for a change of scenery and influence, a chain of amusing events and encounters ensues.
As the young daughter of an affluent Parsee family in Lahore, Lenny is keenly observant of the city’s astonishing diversity—Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, coexisting together. But as Lahore descends into sectarian violence, Lenny’s innocence is lost, and with it the fragile unity of a nation.
Loading his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and widowed mother-in-law into a bullock cart, Faredoon Junglewalla—Freddy for short—leaves his ancestral village for the bustling city of Lahore. Despite the nagging of his unbearable mother-in-law, Freddy’s business and family flourish, and he soon becomes a patriarchal figure in the thriving Parsee community.
