Marwan Hisham
Brothers of the Gun | One World
“They gave us rebels and took the revolution,” wrote poet Muhammad Al-Maghout, quoted by Hisham in this raw, savage and compassionate account of the civil war in his country, Syria. This is also a story of young adulthood and friendship—one of Hisham’s closest friends died at the hands of Assad’s troops; the other threw in his lot with Islamists. Molly Crabapple’s ink drawings brilliantly capture the pity and confusion of a brutalised landscape.
Madhu Tandan
Hemis | HarperCollins
In this novel, Madhu Tandan, author of spiritual and psychological works, tells the story of a man who, troubled by a rocky marriage, goes trekking in Ladakh—only to be trapped in a monastic sanctuary due to terrible floods. There, he learns something of passion beyond the corporeal flames of Eros.
Nadia Akbar
Goodbye Freddie Mercury | Penguin
The decadence of Lahore’s high—in multiple senses—society is on display in Pakistani-American author Nadia Akbar’s debut novel, as a popular RJ helping out an old friend and a student trying to escape the confines of her own traditional milieu become entangled in a web of drugs, rock ’n roll, political intrigue and each other.
